Chapter 7 #2
She grins like this delights her.
“Don’t worry,” she says, stirring her milkshake with a straw. “This work does that to people.”
“Have you always believed that this shit is out there? That there are random… entities?”
“I have.” The answer comes fast. Easy. No embarrassment attached to it whatsoever. Just a sincere smile.
I blink at her over my Diet Coke. “Really.”
Taylor nods, completely serious now. “I mean, look around.” She gestures toward the diner windows, toward the endless desert outside. “You really think humans are the most advanced, most interesting thing in existence? That feels so narcissistic to me.”
I’m not totally bought in. “We're the most advanced species on this planet, though, so it makes sense why people would think that way. This world is all we really know, you know?”
“I know.” She steals another fry. “But people act like believing in Bigfoot or aliens or spirits is somehow crazy, but then they’ll turn around and believe a blue checkmark life coach named Brayden has all the answers because he owns a podcast mic and has a man bun.”
I laugh despite myself.
Taylor leans forward conspiratorially. “Also, scientifically speaking, we understand less than one percent of consciousness. Or the ocean. Or mushrooms.”
“Mushrooms?”
“Mushrooms are wild,” she says, without a trace of irony. “Let me know if you ever want my take on them.”
I stare at her. She stares back.
“I cannot tell when you’re joking.”
“That’s because I rarely am.” She shrugs. “But seriously. I think humans have this weird need to feel alone because it makes us feel important. Like we’re the center of the story. The chosen ones.” She shrugs. “Meanwhile, I’d bet the universe is crawling with things we don’t understand.”
“Crawling feels aggressive.”
“You know what I mean.” She points her—well, my—fry at me. “And I don’t even mean just in a physical sense. I think there are energies and frequencies and dimensions we—” she wiggles her fingers in the air— “can’t access normally.”
As someone who has had their tarot cards read a handful of times and does cling to certain crystals, I understand her. Probably not the dimensions part. But the rest of it.
The idea that maybe humans don’t know nearly as much as we pretend to.
That some things are sitting just outside our understanding, waiting for us to catch up.
I glance down at my laptop again, at the frozen waveform of the sound from the canyon.
Taylor watches me for a second before her expression softens, giving me a look that makes me feel more seen than I appreciate.
Not Miles-level sincere. Not Maya-level assessing.
Taylor is different. Like she clocks things sideways, through energy and instinct, then says something devastating with a smile.
“You’re listening to the sound, aren’t you?” She nods to the laptop.
I’m tired of pretending I’m not. I close my laptop halfway. “What do you think it was?”
Taylor’s grin amps up a few notches as she raises her eyebrows. “I have no idea, but I'm excited to find out.”
It’s the least comforting answer possible.
Then she steals another fry and leaves.
Maya passes through later with a stack of receipts and a phone pressed between her shoulder and ear, speaking in that eerily calm tone women use when they’re two seconds away from destroying someone’s life via spreadsheet. She sees me, points once in greeting, mouths “Working?”
I nod.
She gives me a thumbs-up and keeps moving. I love her for it.
And Miles… Miles doesn’t come back in.
I catch glimpses of him outside the diner window throughout the afternoon.
On the phone again. Leaning against the Machine in the RV park.
Pacing near the gas pumps. Once, standing alone with one hand on his hip, forearm flexing, head tilted back toward the sky like he’s either praying or calculating cloud movement.
Maybe both.
I should stop watching him. But I don’t stop watching him.
By the time the sun starts dipping, my notes are a mess.
Not bad.
Messy in a way that feels alive.
The first episode no longer reads like a clean, jokey piece.
It reads like uncertainty. Like the moment skepticism meets something it can’t immediately swallow. Like me, sitting in a diner, replaying a sound until my coffee goes cold.
I don’t feel 100 percent about it yet, mostly because I’m terrified of how Marissa and listeners are going to vibe with it. But I like it. I hate how much better it feels than the last twenty episodes I’ve done.
When I get back to the Machine, it smells like garlic and tomatoes. Something warm and rich, absurd for a vehicle parked in the middle of nowhere.
I climb the steps slowly, suspicious.
Inside, the RV has transformed. It’s still cramped and gear-filled and feels like a bunker for hot nerds. But the energy is different. Softer.
It seems Sunday dinner is not casual.
Taylor is heading outside to set mismatched plates on a folding table, humming along to music coming from a tiny speaker.
Jax is slicing a loaf of grocery-store French bread with a knife that looks too dramatic for bread.
Maya is pouring salad from a bag into a bowl with the expression of someone who does not consider salad “cooking” but is participating for morale.
And Miles is at the tiny stove.
Cooking. Actually cooking.
There’s sauce simmering in a pan, pasta steaming in a pot, chicken cutlets crisping in another skillet like he’s running an Italian food truck.
His sleeves are pushed up, arms on full display. His hair is messy from the heat. There’s a dish towel slung over one shoulder and a smear of flour near his wrist.
My mouth waters, and not because of the food.
“Oh no,” I say before I can stop myself.
Miles glances over his shoulder. “What?”
“Nothing.”
His eyes narrow. “That sounded like something.”
“It was private.”
“So you narrate your daily life, privately?”
Taylor laughs as she comes back into the kitchen to take food out to the table. “She just saw you cooking, man. Give her a second.”
I point at her, shaking my head. “Not what that was.”
Miles looks between us, confused.
I roll my eyes, hoping no one sees the heat blooming on my cheeks.
“Sunday dinner,” Maya explains, sliding past me with the salad. “Crew rule.”
“Rule feels too boring,” Jax says. “It’s more like a sacred ritual.”
“It was my mom’s thing,” Miles says, turning back to the stove.
He says it easily. No big emotional announcement. Just fact.
I feel the words settle in the space anyway.
Family. That’s what this is.
Not a bit. Not content. Not a quirky team tradition designed to humanize them.
Family. And suddenly I feel like an outsider again. Standing at the edge of something already built, not sure whether I’m allowed to step closer.
Jax and Maya keep their conversation going, discussing recent ghost activity in Colorado.
I move to stand next to Miles and grab the oregano off of an impeccably organized spice rack.
The spices’ labels are so precisely printed they could win a government audit.
Miles stirs the sauce and lifts the spoon to his lips for a taste, and my eyes linger on his mouth.
He catches me staring and licks his lips.
Then, he grabs the oregano from my hand, his fingers lingering on mine.
He smiles and then sprinkles some of the spice into the pan.
My shoulder brushes his side, and my breath catches, the tension simmering like the sauce he’s working on.
“Uh, you re-label your spice containers?” I ask, because being moved by chicken parm feels too dangerous.
He picks up a jar of ground black pepper that is already labeled by the manufacturer, but has “BLACK PEPPER” stamped across it by a label maker. He glances back at me, straight-faced. “Yes.”
“Of course you do.”
“It’s just redundancy for the sake of efficiency. I don’t understand why everyone thinks it’s unreasonable.”
“Because it is.”
“Do you want unlabeled oregano in your food?”
“It was labeled.”
“You would last ten minutes in an actual survival scenario.”
“I lasted in LA dating culture for ten years.”
He pauses. Then nods once. “Different kind of wilderness, but okay.”
Jax laughs. “She got you there.”
Miles points the wooden spoon at him. “Don’t encourage her.”
This level of domesticity between friends was weird at first. But I’m warming up to it.
There’s no putting on a show here. No one is trying to impress anyone. No one is adjusting their tone for an audience. Even with me standing there, even with the podcast hanging over them, they’re just themselves.
Taylor argues about garlic bread distribution.
Jax steals cheese.
Maya pretends not to notice.
Miles cooks like feeding them is part of leading them.
Miles’s ease and authenticity hit me harder than I expected.
I spend my days inside rooms where everyone is selling some version of themselves.
Celebrities try to seem relatable, or influencers try to seem effortless.
Men try to seem deeper than they are, or women try to seem less angry than they have every right to be.
Everybody is performing. Even me. Especially me. But Miles isn’t. Not in the way I’m used to. And I hate that I want to tell him that.
He’s absurdly self-aware and somehow not self-conscious. He knows he’s weird, knows people laugh, and he keeps going anyway. He believes what he believes, cooks dinner, labels his spice containers, sets boundaries with laminated documents, and doesn’t shrink when I poke at him.
He doesn’t posture.
He doesn’t try to be cool.
He doesn’t seem scared of being seen.
And that… God, that is attractive in a way I did not budget for emotionally.
“Daisy,” Maya says.
I blink. “What?”
“You want to sit before Taylor claims your spot?”
I nod, following her outside. Dinner is loud. Chaotic. Warm.
“This is insane,” I say after one bite. The chicken parm is, of course, excellent.
Miles looks up. “Bad insane or good insane?”
“Unbelievably insane?”
His smile flickers. “That sounds positive.”
“It is. Unfortunately.”
He laughs under his breath and ducks his head like he’s trying not to enjoy the compliment too much.