standalones

Prologue

The problem with Max was that the more infuriating he was, the more he smiled, and the more he smiled, the more Sloane wanted to look at his face, which was the thing infuriating her in the first place. It was a fucking—what was the word. Catastrophe? Apostrophe? Apiary? Protozoa?

“Paradox!” she yelped, pointing at him with an outstretched hand. It was her champagne-holding hand, and it sloshed everywhere. Fortunately, they were outside and the grass seemed thirsty.

“A pair of what?”

“I swear to god.”

“How is it a paradox that Tahoe might have a majestic, ancient lake monster?” Max asked. And now he was grinning at her, all relaxed and sprawled across three separate chairs, his tie off and the top buttons of his shirt undone. Extremely fucking lookable.

“That’s not the paradox, because it doesn’t!” Sloane said. She was repeating herself. She’d been repeating herself, more or less, for the past five minutes, and it was doing absolutely nothing to convince Max that she was right. “If there were a giant lizard-y snake eel monster thing in Lake Tahoe, we would have evidence beyond stupid drunk people bringing it up once in a while to explain doing stupid drunk shit.”

“Not if Tessie wants to stay hidden,” he said, still grinning. He had nice teeth. They were a tiny bit crooked, his incisors a little too sharp, his eyeteeth not quite at the right angle. If he’d grown up somewhere else—Los Angeles or San Francisco, or any bigger city—he’d probably have gotten braces, Sloane figured. But in Last Chance, only the kids who really needed braces got them and everyone else went through life a little imperfect.

Sloane had been one of the kids who really needed braces. Of course she had been.

“Tessie isn’t even a good name. It’s named after the Loch Ness Monster,” she kept arguing. “Some snake oil salesman in the eighteen hundreds heard about that one, took a good look at Lake Tahoe, and decided to invent a monster with an incredibly derivative name. Honestly, it’s insulting.”

“If you find it, I bet they’d let you rename it.”

“I’m not going to find the Lake Tahoe monster because there is no Lake Tahoe monster,” Sloane said. “How would it survive? What would it live on? How would it reproduce? There’s no way the lake is big enough for the number of monsters you’d need to sustain a population, let alone the number of monsters needed to maintain enough genetic diversity for future generations to thrive.”

“It’s a really deep lake,” Max pointed out. “Maybe the Tessies have some crazy life cycle where most of them are the size of, like, Labradors, and only one queen Tessie at a time gets large enough to terrorize humans up on the surface. Like bees.”

“That’s the opposite of bees!”

Max made a face. “Maybe I mean ants? Don’t they have, like, one giant queen—”

“Yes, but the point is that the queen stays hidden and protected in the nest or the hive, where she fucks a lot of other bees or ants and then lays a lot of eggs and dies eventually,” Sloane said. “They don’t go flying or marching around to mess with humans. And there aren’t really any non-insects that have that kind of social structure. It’s not a thing fish do, so unless Tessie is a giant aquatic insect…”

“Wait, I like that,” Max said. “That’s a really good theory, that Tessie is actually some kind of enormous lake, uh, lobster and the queen has to come to the surface every so often because she needs sunlight to fertilize her eggs. Or something.”

There were so many things wrong with that sentence that all Sloane could do, for several seconds, was stare.

“That,” she finally exhaled. “Is not remotely how any of that works.”

Max sighed, and tipped his head back over the chair in a way that made the tendons in his neck stand out for a minute and the hollow of his throat flex, then deepen. Sloane looked away and drank the last of her un-sloshed champagne, even though she knew it was a bad idea to be drinking even more if she was already noticing Max Fucking Golding’s  throat… stuff.

It wasn’t exactly that she thought hooking up with Max was a bad idea, generally speaking. But it was probably a bad idea at their friends’ wedding, in their hometown, where everyone knew everyone and where she’d have to hear about it later if she did.

“Sloooooane,” he groaned, then lifted his head again to look at her. “Where’s your whimsy?”

Sloane snorted, then uncrossed and re-crossed her ankles, her feet resting on the chair opposite her, next to Max. Her shoes were… somewhere. “I ran out by the time I was eighteen,” she said. “Last Chance sucked me dry of whimsy.”

“Come on, it’s not that bad,” he said, still smiling, still sprawled, still half-undone. His gold-brown hair was pulled back in a bun and strands were escaping here and there, framing his face in a way that was… somehow lovely, despite being his face. “You never went out to Stumbledown Rocks at night with your friends to see who could stay the longest once the Snagtooth started howling?”

“Snagtooth is wind. Stumbledown Rocks are above a hidden slot canyon with some very narrow openings, and when the wind blows hard enough and at the right angle, it sounds like something is howling.”

“Is that what you thought when you were twelve, though?” he asked. “You really thought it was wind when you were a kid?”

Sloane spun the empty champagne glass between her finger and thumb and stared wordlessly at Max for a moment because yeah, she’d always thought that. The first time she’d heard about Snagtooth, she’d figured there was a sensible explanation. Maybe not that it was wind, necessarily, but that it definitely wasn’t the undead form of a long-dead gold miner who’d lost his fortune and lamented about it so long and hard he’d become part wolf. Two decades later, she still couldn’t understand anyone thinking otherwise.

“Yes?” she said, finally.

“You’ve never believed in any of them. For one minute,” he went on. He was starting to look less relaxed.

“No.”

“So you think there’s nothing out there in the woods that we don’t already know about?”

“I didn’t say that,” Sloane pointed out. “I’m not saying that, like, human knowledge is complete, we’ve found everything, let’s pack it all in and go home because we’re done learning things. We find new species of bugs literally every day. I’m just saying that I’ve never seen any evidence of Screaming Pete or Snagtooth or Bigfoot or the Fresno Nightcrawler things or ghosts or any of it. If there were compelling, scientifically sound evidence—”

“Okay, what exactly does that mean? Tons of people have seen these things.”

“It means scientific!”

Max made a two-handed waving gesture, sloshing the remnants of his old-fashioned around the bottom of his glass and nearly spilling it. Sloane figured it meant kindly define what you mean by scientific.

“You know, scientific,” she said, already aware that this was unhelpful. “It means you gotta have findings, and they gotta be replicable, and testable, they have to stand up to rigorous scrutiny and all that. It can’t just be some mountain man saying he made out with the Low Pine Crawler—”

“Eyewitness accounts are valuable!”

“Eyewitness accounts are trash.” Sloane was on a roll. “People have terrible memories, and we’re so easily influenced to remember things differently than how they happened. Eyewitness testimony probably shouldn’t even be allowed in court! Do you know how many wrongful convictions there have been based on eyewitness—”

“I’m not putting people in jail, I’m saying that maybe Crazy Brian isn’t all that crazy and we should check out where he says the Newt Gobbler lives,” Max said, as if that was a reasonable statement.

Sloane paused again and tried to drink more champagne. The glass was empty. Right. “Is that a newt that gobbles, or something that gobbles newts?” she finally asked.

“I think it gobbles newts, but it can be hard to tell with Crazy Brian,” Max admitted.

Sloane nodded, because that did make sense. “So did you?” she asked. “Check out the Newt Gobbler’s cave?”

“Of course I did. No Newt Gobbler, but,” Max paused, raised both eyebrows, and gave her a sly smile, “No newts, either.”

He didn’t seem inclined to say more. Just smirked at her like he’d somehow won this debate, which he obviously, obviously had not.

“Absence of newts is not evidence of a Newt Gobbler,” Sloane said. She couldn’t believe she had to say it out loud.

“But it is consistent with the presence of a Newt Gobbler.”

“So are a hundred other things!”

“One of which is a Newt Gobbler.”

“And one of which is aliens from the planet Kerfawobble whose entire species will die out if they don’t harvest enough newt slime, and Earth newts are their last resource.” Fuck, she was kind of tipsy and starting to get louder and was definitely yelling about the planet Kerfawobble, none of which was really proper behavior for a wedding guest.

But when she glanced back at the ongoing party, twenty feet away—the bride’s older relatives sitting around tables, drinking and talking, the bride and groom and other friends on the dance floor—no one seemed to notice that she was yelling at Max. So it was probably fine.

She took a deep breath and turned back to Max, who was still sitting opposite her in the loose circle of folding chairs that everyone else had abandoned, and who was still infuriating, face-wise.

“Psst. Hey,” he said, and in one weirdly graceful move, he put his feet on the ground and then leaned in toward her.

Sloane narrowed her eyes. Max’s hands were still curved around his (empty) old-fashioned glass. They looked too large to hold it that carefully, but they were. He had short, gold-brown hairs on his wrists that somehow managed to catch the low light from the lanterns hung in the oak tree above them.

“What?”

“C’mere.”

Sloane glanced around. There was no one within earshot.

“No.”

“Come on.”

“Just tell me from there, who’s gonna hear you?”

He sighed and looked like he was trying not to smile, and turned the glass around in his careful hands that still seemed slightly too large for it, and Sloane had drunk too much because everything about that was… interesting.

“Please? My professional reputation is at stake, here.”

Sloane tilted her head back and gave the biggest sigh she could, right up at the tree. “Fine,” she said, righted herself, put her champagne glass on the ground where it would definitely not be a problem later, took her feet off the chair opposite her, and leaned in, hands anchored next to her thighs. “What?”

“I don’t think there’s really a Newt Gobbler,” he said, voice low and hushed, his face somehow perfectly serious.

“Okay,” Sloane said, after a beat.

“I think there were never newts in that cave, and I think Crazy Brian just likes getting to talk into a camera and then read the YouTube comments about it later.”

“So you’re a charlatan.”

“Come on, I’m not mixing up sugar water and claiming it cures cancer, for fuck’s sake,” he said, and now he was smiling. Like it was funny that he was lying to people all the time. “Some guy says there’s a Newt Gobbler, I go interview the guy, look for the Newt Gobbler, and when I don’t find the Newt Gobbler I say hey so it looks like there’s no Newt Gobbler here.”

“You’re still leading people on,” Sloane said, which got an eyebrow raise from Max, so she kept going. “You never say there continues to be no evidence of any of these fucking cryptids, you say we haven’t found these fucking cryptids yet. There’s a difference.”

“First, if I said fucking, I’d get de-monetized.” Sloane rolled her eyes at him. “And second, of course I say that, the yet is the whole point. Without the yet it’s just a weirdo and a cave with no newts.”

“It’s a cave with no newts no matter what you say about it.”

Max looked at her. It took a long time, the looking. He looked at Sloane with his copper-brown eyes and his hands too gentle on that old-fashioned glass, and Sloane looked right back because like hell was Max Golding going to make her feel rummaged through like this.

“You never hoped for more?” he finally asked. “You never heard the wind through the gorge and wanted to it to be something more than physics?”

“I like physics,” Sloane said, because why was he impugning physics? Physics held the world together.

“You know what I mean,” he went on, and gestured with the glass. “More than this. Bigger.”

Now it was Sloane’s turn to look: at brown eyes and silver-rimmed glasses, at the live oak tree stretched over them, at the wedding party still on the dance floor surrounded by the tall, thick trunks of old pine, at the deep sky beyond and the darkness in the woods.

Last Chance was perched in the Sierras halfway between Tahoe and Sacramento, and it had one road in and that same road back out. It had a population of eleven thousand and a newspaper that reported on lost dogs. It had a high school, an elementary school, and a town hall a century and a half old. It had never quite lost its boomtown feel, first thanks to the mines, and now thanks to the tourists. As far as Sloane could tell, that was all it was ever going to be.

“I hoped for more, but not like that,” she said, like Max had lost his mind or missed the point completely, or maybe both. “I wanted something bigger and better than Last Chance, not bigger and better than physics.”

“No imagination,” Max said, and made a face Sloane couldn’t quite parse. “It’s all a good story if you tell it right. That’s the whole point.”

“You’re still lying to people.”

“People love getting lied to.” Now there was a little smile playing around his lips. “They love that little thrill, the there are no newts in this cave, but maybe in the next one?”

The newt thing had really gotten out of hand. Sloane was going to have weird dreams about newts. She’d also probably think of Max and his pretty eyes and solid hands the next time someone else brought up a newt, and ugh, why.

“That’s not a thrill, that’s betrayal,” she said.

 Max rolled his eyes. “Come with me some time.” Sloane had no idea what he was talking about, so she stared at him until he kept talking. “On a gig. Looking for Bigfoot is fun. Come see what you’re missing.”

“No, thanks.”

“What if I made it a bet?” Max asked, easy and friendly, leaning forward a little more. “If Sarah and Michael get married before Nicole and Gillian, you come record a video with me. If it’s the other way around, I’ll come carry your suitcases at a conference or something.”

“I don’t really need suitcase help,” Sloane said, because this was stupid and she had to say something.

“Then I’ll be your assistant who clicks the slide projector.”

“What? I don’t—slide projector? Like, with slides?”

Max started laughing.

“It’s a laptop,” she said, suddenly baffled and overwhelmed, and feeling a little like there was a joke she didn’t get. “It’s all laptops, with a remote—”

“Then put me to work in whatever boring way you want. Jesus. Is it a bet or not?”

Sloane glanced over her shoulder. Nicole and Gillian hadn’t been dating that long, as far as she knew, but Sarah and Michael had been together since high school—half the people she’d gone to high school were married to their high school sweethearts—so probably, they’d get engaged first.

“Fine,” she said, and couldn’t help letting a tiny smile onto her face. “You’re on.”

“Excellent.” Max smiled in the warm, pretty light with his imperfect teeth, and Sloane had to look away for a moment.

Room Serviced is coming June 5!

CONTENT NOTES

Warnings for: parental death (off-page), PTSD, past war atrocities, past war injury, brief physical violence, on-page explicit sex.