Page 54 of Room Serviced
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.”
The apartment had one bedroom and one bathroom, and Sloane had to go through the bedroom to get to the bathroom, because apparently it had been designed by some sort of monster or maybe a robot. The building wasn’t new, not by a long shot, so maybe bathrooms through bedrooms had been some apartment design fad in the 1960s. A conversation pit would have been preferable.
Max’s bedroom, she noticed completely by accident as he showed her through, was surprisingly neat and cozy. There were some haphazard stacks of books along a wall and clothes piled onto a chair in a corner, but the bed was made and she’d have bet twenty bucks the sheets were fresh. The last time Sloane had hooked up with someone who slept on a mattress on the floor, she’d been in college. She had standards, but—Max had, like, a real bedroom.
The shower, to her semi-relief, was kind of shitty. It was clean, and it had surprisingly nice stuff in it, but it was small and ugly and no matter what she did, the door managed to drip water all over the floor and she had to soak it up awkwardly with the bath mat. She took a little longer than she needed to, because she did feel gross from the drive, but also—Sloane needed to think.
She’d spent way more time than she wanted to dissecting crash at my place, and she’d always wound up deciding that it translated to probably another casual hookup. Which was fine—It was fine! She had a great time casually hooking up with Max!—but now there had been matching plates and wine and a dinner that had clearly taken time and thought, and…
And Sloane didn’t have hopes for this, but if she did, they’d have been up.
Once she was out of the shower and into the pajamas she’d brought—which included a tank top but not a bra—she’d decided they needed to have a talk. In the morning, probably once they were in the car and on the way to Last Chance, because there was a possibility she was going to say Are we a thing and he was going to say No, obviously not, what are you talking about and Sloane was absolutely going to get laid before that happened.
Before she left the bathroom, hair still wet, she grabbed her phone and texted Jess.
Sloane
he made fancy pasta and got wine and put out cheese and hummus for an appetizer
“Crash at my place” why are men like this
Jess
lolllll I told you so
he bark yet?
Sloane left the last message on read.
Max was in the living room, laptop in his lap, feet on the coffee table, when Sloane walked back in.
