Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
Sloane grabbed the box of condoms out of her nightstand, pulled a few out, and then stood there and frowned at them.
Her carry-on-sized suitcase lay at her feet, full of the things she’d need for Thanksgiving at her parents’ house: jeans, a reasonably nice top, earplugs so she could sleep, the headphones she’d accidentally stolen from her brother the last time she visited and was finally returning. Socks and a sweater and shit.
On the bed was the overnight bag she’d packed for visiting Max. No point in lugging her whole suitcase into his apartment when she wasn’t going to need most of what was in there. A separate bag was much more efficient, obviously. Except now she was overthinking every single item she put into it.
Including the condoms, though on literally any other trip she’d have included them without a second thought, because you never knew.
Outside her open bedroom door, Jess walked past. Three seconds later, she walked backward into view.
“You good?” she asked. Sloane realized she was holding up several condoms and staring at them. “Are those gonna predict your future or something?”
“If someone offered to let you crash at their place,” Sloane said, and looked over at Jess without putting the condoms down, “does that imply sex or no?”
“I think, usually, crash implies a couch. Or similar,” Jess said. “But this is the laundry-demon summoner from your hometown?”
“Max,” Sloane supplied, even though Jess damn well knew his name. They’d briefly met a few days ago, while Sloane and Max were FaceTiming.
“Yeah, you’re gonna fuck,” Jess said. “He’s from California, and everything all of you from here say is two levels too casual.”
“All my statements are the correct level of casual.”
“When you asked if I wanted to be roommates, you opened with, ‘We should hang more.’”
Jess was from somewhere outside Philadelphia, but Sloane had never held that against her and wasn’t going to start now. “Sorry for not sending an engraved invitation?”
“And there’s no such thing as formal flip-flops,” Jess went on, a debate they had every couple of months. Sloane opened her mouth to argue, but Jess kept talking. “Yes, he’s down for sex. You can tell because he said ‘crash’ and not ‘crash or whatever.’”
For once, Sloane decided not to argue. “You’re probably right,” she said, and tossed the condoms into the bag.
“No, I’m definitely right,” Jess said, still in the doorway as Sloane tossed some pajamas into the bag. Maybe she’d wear them. Maybe not. “I mean, if you told him to get on his knees and start barking, he’d do it.”
“You talked to him for ten seconds,” Sloane said.
“It was an informative ten seconds.”
“Barking is very specific,” Sloane said as Jess disappeared from her doorway.
“I have a sixth sense for men who are down bad,” Jess called from somewhere down their hallway. Sloane snorted, because Jess’s heart was in the right place, but she was obviously wrong.
“He’s not—”
“Yes, he is!” Jess shouted.
The drive could have been worse. Traffic wasn’t particularly awful, and being November, it wasn’t too hot or windy, and she learned a lot about platypuses from a podcast. They were smaller than she’d thought.
Still, with traffic and bathroom breaks and stopping to eat lunch and oh-my-god-I-have-to-stand-up-or-I’ll-die breaks, it took almost nine hours before Sloane was parallel parking on the street outside Max’s building and her GPS was informing her that she’d arrived at her destination.
She was still standing on the strip of grass next to her car, trying to unkink her lower back, when a door in Max’s building opened, spilling light across the courtyard, and then Max was walking toward her.
“Hey,” she said, eloquently.
“Hey,” he answered. His hair was pulled back in a bun, a few strands drifting down the back of his neck, and he was smiling. “How was the drive?”
“Long and boring,” she said, and shook her arms out. “Did you know platypuses are only about eighteen inches long and weigh three or four pounds?”
Max looked very thoughtful for a moment. “Huh,” he finally said. “I thought they were, like, Labrador-sized.”
“They’re smaller than cats,” Sloane said, opening the trunk of her car and pulling out her overnight bag. “And the males have venomous spurs on their hind— I can carry that.”
“I know,” Max said, hefting her bag over his shoulder. “My place is the second one on the left, with the skeleton on the door.”
“You know Halloween’s over, right?” Sloane asked, following him as she aimed her key at her car to lock it.
“What makes you think it’s there for Halloween?” Max asked, and led them up the steps.
Sloane had assumed she’d drop off her stuff and then they’d go get pizza and tacos or something, but the smell in Max’s apartment stopped her in her tracks.
“Did you cook, or is that a weird candle?” she asked, leaving her shoes by the door.
“Do they make tomato-sauce scented candles?”
“I’m sure someone does.”
“I cooked,” he said, over his shoulder, barefoot now, walking past a couch and depositing her bag on it. “You’re hungry, right?”
Sloane’s stomach took the opportunity to remind her that she’d had In-N-Out for lunch five hours ago and nothing but pretzel sticks since.
“I could eat.”
“Good,” he said, and waved at his kitchen table, where there was a plate of cheese and crackers and a plate of sliced peppers and hummus. “Have a snack. Dinner will be ready in about fifteen minutes.”
Crash at my place, Sloane thought, scooping hummus onto a slice of bell pepper. I hate it when Jess is right.
“This looks great,” she said aloud. “I like your place. What’s for dinner?” Every sentence felt weird in her mouth, so she solved that problem by putting more hummus in it.
“Bolognese and salad,” he said, and shrugged, like it was no big deal. Sloane wasn’t an expert, but she was pretty sure it was a medium deal, at least. “Don’t tell my grandmother I made it in the crockpot. She’d wonder where she went wrong.”
It was a small kitchen in a small apartment, so Max was all of six feet away, standing at the stove, and he looked over at her and grinned.
“I could give her a list if she wants one,” Sloane offered, eating a cracker.
“Good luck with that. She’s been dead for six years.”
Sloane didn’t say anything, just slathered more cheese onto a cracker and put it in her mouth, watching Max until he looked at her again.
“What?”
“And being dead prevents you from communicating in any measurable fashion?” Sloane asked. She was sitting in one of the two chairs around the table.
“Yes, because she’s not a ghost,” Max said easily, dumping pasta into a big pot of water. “If she were, she’d be haunting me about my cooking skills, among other things. Like why I haven’t given her great-grandchildren yet.”
Sloane couldn’t tell what was wrong with his cooking skills, but maybe she’d figure it out. “I take it your grandparents weren’t hippies?”
“Definitely not,” he said, stirring the pot. “Were yours?”
“My dad’s parents were,” Sloane offered. “They met in San Francisco in the sixties but had to move back and get married when my grandma got pregnant with my uncle.”
Max’s kitchen had a counter peninsula separating the cooking portion from the dining portion, and now he pushed a few dishes out of the way and leaned his elbows on it.
“Which is probably why my dad is the way he is,” she went on. “Hearing about the evils of free love will send you to law school, I guess.”
“Oh, is that how that works?”
“I’m just saying: My grandparents badmouthed hippies a whole lot, and my dad couldn’t wait to have a job where he wore a suit to work,” Sloane said, shrugging. “I mean, he’s a public defender, but still."
“Could be worse,” Max agreed, and then snapped his fingers. “Right. You want something to drink?”
Max had wine, a cabernet with a picture of a castle on the bottle.
The salad had goat cheese and candied walnuts, and he plated their pasta with a little swirl.
Their plates matched. Their salad bowls matched.
If they hadn’t been drinking the wine out of (matching) tumblers, Sloane would have had to go hyperventilate in her car.
Crash at my place. Stupid Californians. Max had made appetizers, and her hair was in the same ugly, messy bun it had been in when she’d left Los Angeles.
“Of course jackalopes aren’t real,” Max was saying. They’d finished eating and were drinking wine now, and he was grinning and giving her shit while leaning back in his chair. “How would they get into their burrows with those antlers?”
“Sure, now reality matters,” Sloane said. “Fine, what do you make videos about during desert season?”
According to Max, making videos about fake monsters was seasonal and he tackled the desert monsters during the winter. Sloane couldn’t blame him. She didn’t want to spend much time in the Mojave in August, either.
“Last year, I did the haunted opera house outside Death Valley and went looking for the Lone Pine Mountain Devil,” he said.
“This year, there’s a desert bigfoot in Anza-Borrego, a lake monster west of Lancaster, and I was thinking of tracking down some rumors about the frog people who live under Los Angeles. ”
“I think I work with some of them,” Sloane said, and Max laughed. Sloane smiled into her wineglass.
“According to legend, they live in elaborate tunnels under the city and are headquartered under the Staples Center, or whatever it’s called now,” he went on.
Sloane drained the rest of her wine and put the glass on the table. She’d only had one, but after the long drive it’d gone to her head more than she’d been expecting, and she didn’t have a good answer for I’m coming to Los Angeles to look for frog people.
“That area’s pretty crowded now—it might be tricky,” she said, instead of grappling with anything else at the moment. “Do you mind if I use your shower? I’m kind of gross.”