Page 7 of Room Serviced
Normally, Max thought he was pretty good at reading people. He dated a normal amount, hooked up pretty regularly, and was usually pretty good at telling when someone wanted to make out or fuck. And usually, if he wasn’t sure, he could ask.
But he’d known Sloane for a long time. In high school, they’d been the kind of casual friends who didn’t stay in touch after graduation, but they’d drifted back together in the past few years when all their peers had started getting married. Maybe he didn’t know her all that well, but he knew she said what she was thinking rather than dropping hints.
Besides, Max and Sloane were about to spend two whole days together. A lot of that time together was going to be late at night, in the dark. Starting off with Hey, wanna fuck? was probably not the move.
“Oh,” he said, instead of Are you flirting with me. “Seems like a good way to get sued.”
“Probably,” Sloane admitted. “Unless they advertised it as part of a matchmaking package or something. Like, come stay for a week, get a different cliché every day. Cliché a day is pretty good, actually.”
“Go pitch it to Brian.”
“Monday: one bed. Tuesday: marry an earl to get your inheritance. Wednesday: kidnapped by sexy pirates.”
“Do you divorce the earl first?”
“I think you get the marriage annulled.”
“Ah. Romantic.”
Sloane laughed, and Max couldn’t help but grin.
“Okay, we’ll workshop it some,” she said. “Should we go check out all the haunting hotspots?”
Chapter Two
Somehow, Max made an iPad look like a clipboard. Not literally—it still had a screen and everything—but with the way he was carrying it around and pointing at things, she’d have sworn he was carrying a clipboard. He had clipboard energy.
“You’ve really got clipboard energy,” Sloane told him as he was glancing between something on the iPad and the path in front of them.
“Thanks. Clipboards are hot,” he said. “And people who use clipboards are attractive, responsible, motivated individuals. Also, no one questions you if you’ve got a clipboard. Go stand over there and look ghostly.”
It was late afternoon. The sun hung low over the ocean. The temperature was starting to dip with the breeze coming in from the water. Sloane was still in a tank top and shorts, and this was the fourth location they’d scouted to set up equipment.
“I have a better idea,” she said. “How about you point that last camera literally at anything, and we go have drinks in the hotel bar.”
“The Byron.” He fiddled with something on the camera.
“They named the hotel bar after a fuckboy who had a kid with his sister?”
That, at least, got Max to look up at her. “He what?”
“I mean, allegedly,” Sloane said, backtracking a little. “And I think it was his half sister.”
Max rubbed his hands over his face. “Oh, well that’s fine. Half sister. Cool.”
“And he had a pet bear in college.”
“Where the fuck did he get a bear?” Max asked, now completely distracted from the camera. “England doesn’t have bears.”
Sloane had never considered that aspect of it before.
“I mean, if you wanted a pet bear, I could get you a bear in, like, five minutes,” Max said, gazing into the distance with his arms folded over his chest, deep in thought. “But England in the seventeen…hundreds?”
“Eighteen hundreds?”
“Either way, different story. You’d have to import a bear.”
“This would be a great chat at the bar, over drinks,” Sloane said as the breeze picked up a little more. She shivered and put a hand on top of her head to hold her hat still, even though she’d tied on the chin strap. Hard to be too careful where giant sun hats were concerned.
