Archive of Our Own

It’s not Moses’s fault in the slightest, Chloe would like him to know that if he asks later, but it’s definitely the flash of his headlights as he rounds the corner to pick them up that turns Max’s bad but mostly under control trip right back to what the experts would call a “psychedelic crisis”.

They probably should’ve just walked to the science building, you know? It’s not too far to walk, but there’s a lot of woods between the Abraxas House and the actual campus, and Max isn’t really in the position to either go hiking right now or go back in the canoe and start paddling their way back across the lake. Without proper lights, anyway, they’re just as likely to drown or get mauled by a bear–does Vermont have bears?–as they are to find their way to Moses safely. And Max, at the time Chloe chose to wait by the road for Moses to come get them, looked like she was settling into a more manageable trip, content to hang off of Chloe’s arm and smile serenely up at her, not talking but occasionally humming under her breath to music only she could hear. It looked like things were going to be fine, like this was going to be a really weird end to a really weird birthday, but not necessarily a bad one. And then Moses’s little economical hybrid rounds the corner with its high beams on and the light lands on them without any warning.

The framing isn’t exactly right, but Chloe – this Chloe, herself Chloe and not a different, completely dead one – doesn’t have the memories that Max has of the night of the Vortex Club party, and she doesn’t have Max’s memories of the dark room, only her own fuzzy recollection of the shit Prescott did to her and what Max would talk about in the intervening years, which was never a lot and always with a lot of reluctance. So, ultimately, she doesn’t know that it’s the headlights that did it, it could be just the space, being in the remote dark, with the trees closing in around them, or the faint sounds of Moses’s quiet car’s tires crunching on the asphalt towards them. Hell, it could be Chloe herself that did it, or Max looking up at her and maybe seeing, in her addled state, a shadow across her face that could be a bullet hole.

Regardless, Moses pulls up and Max drops, taking Chloe with her.

She doesn’t scream, really, only makes this half-voiced, half-breathed sound of animal fear, like a deer barking. One of Chloe’s knees hit wet leaf litter, and she has enough presence of mind to be disgusted by the wet crunch of it before she adjusts her weight. Max, crumpled with her ass on the ground, pulls her knees up against herself and wheezes so hard it sounds like she’s sucking air in through a chest wound. She winds one arm around herself and flutters the other meaninglessly in the air. Chloe catches it on the next wave and wrings both sets of fingers together so tightly that she swears she hears their combined knuckles squeak. She doesn’t know how much more fucked the space-time continum could even get at this point, but she bets that trying to reverse time while tripping balls isn’t going to fix anything about it.

“Chloe,” Max gets out between panicked breathing, “you can’t be here. You have to go.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” she says. “I’m right here, Super Max, just hang on to me. Can you breathe with me? Come on, you’re not getting any air to your brain doing that, we gotta keep those cells fed.”

“No, Chloe, you can’t – Jefferson’s coming, you shouldn’t be here. Rachel, in the – he killed her.”

When Chloe pulls back to look at her, Max’s eyes are wide, blown black, and flitting in every direction, searching for syringes in any unseen corner and muzzle flashes behind every car headlight. Chloe can’t know what she must see right now, but she can imagine it. She leans her shoulder against Max’s, wrapping an arm around her shoulders to bring their weight together, and buffs the sleeve of Max’s Steve Jobs turtleneck with the palm of her hand, from Max’s shoulder to her elbow and then back up.

“It’s okay,” she reassures, dumbly, uselessly. “We’re okay, Max, it’s going to be okay.”

She hears Moses slam the car door, but doesn’t see him as anything other than a shape moving in the dark until he crosses the beaming headlights and faces them, his face drawn up in a shivery panic. “What’s wrong with her? Is she hurt?”

“Drugs,” Chloe says. Then, “No, she’s just having a really bad time. How many seats you have in the back of that thing?”

“Three?” he says. “The normal amount?”

“Oh, good. Help me get her inside, I don’t think she can walk right now.”

Max isn’t a skinny little eighteen-year-old with bangs anymore, but she’s still small enough for Chloe to at least hold upright, even if it requires scooping, letting go of Max’s hand to better hold her, one arm around the shoulders and the other at her waist. Her knees buckle and shake, and her head lolls down to her hands, which rise up to cover it, palms pressed hard over her eyes like she could rub them out. She makes injured animal noises the whole time, moaning and whimpering and chattering her teeth together.

Moses kind of doesn’t look so hot himself either. His mouth works without saying anything, and he rushes to open the back seat door. “She doesn’t look so good. Maybe we should drive her out to Lakeport Medical?”

“No!” Max shrieks. “No! Don’t touch me! No!”

Which sucks, because Chloe can’t get her into the car without touching her. She tries to be quick and cursory about it, pushing her to sit inside first and then kneeling down to bundle her dangling legs after her, but there’s no way to do it without feeling like the worst person on earth, Max’s panting gone to swallowed whimpering and clawing hands. Then, once she’s buckled in, she gives up trying to escape all at once, leaving crescent moon-shaped marks on the back of Chloe’s hand where her blunt nails dug in. She doesn’t make any more noise after that, just puts her head in her hands and shakes and shakes.

Just looking at her, Chloe wants to throw up. She had to do it, leaving Max out here isn’t an option, but she still wants to pitch herself in the lake. It’s not enough to think of what happened to Max in the Dark Room, or what happened to Rachel in the Dark Room, it’s layered over fresher guilt, picturing Max in a motel room, bent over a postcard. She ought to sit shotgun and give Max her space, but she can’t bring herself to do anything but walk to the opposite side of the hybrid and buckle in right beside her. It would be dereliction of duty to do anything else, and it’s not like she wouldn’t feel just as rotten a seat away.

She expects Moses to hesitate more, but he goes to the driver’s seat with some resolve. He pulls the seat belt over himself without saying anything, then settles his hands at ten and two, his lips gone a paler shade of pinkish-brown from being pressed so firmly together.

“Do you know anywhere quiet we could take her?” she asks. “It’s going to be a while until she finishes riding this out, and I think the E.R. would pitch her to fucking Neptune right now. Somewhere low stress?”

“...There’s the planetarium in the science building,” he says, after some hesitation. “It should be closed right now, there won’t be anyone there but us.”

“Perfect. Thanks, man.”

“Don’t mention it.” He shifts the car to drive and starts reversing direction on the narrow road, maneuvering through a three-point turn to turn them back the way he came. “What’s happening to her? Will she be alright?”

“She should be,” Chloe says, trying for more confidence than she feels. “It’s just a cosmically bad trip, you know? And, uh, not the first time she’s been drugged without being up for it. The first time was pretty traumatic for her, so it’s honestly kind of a reasonable reaction.”

“Of course I would. Twice?”

“She had this unbelievably shitty photography teacher in high school.”

“I read about the court case,” he starts. “Mark Jeffer –”

Chloe hisses before he can finish the thought. “Don’t say the name right now, dude, you’ll set her off even worse.”

“Right,” Moses says.

He sounds sheepish, and that makes Chloe feel a level of guilt beyond what she already was feeling, which should really not be possible. She’s only dimly aware of the thoughts and feelings of the version of her who survived Arcadia Bay but who Arcadia Bay itself did not survive, and you’d think that a person would hit a certain guilt threshold after which they can’t feel guilty anymore, but, as it turns out, you can always get a little more guilty.

And the queen of guilt herself continues to trip horrendously next to Chloe, pulling her legs up onto Moses’s nice, clean car seat, getting muddy bootprints in her effort to bring her knees up to her chest. Her face, whenever Chloe can get a glimpse of it, is swollen red and salt-streaked from rolling sweat, and she looks nothing like Professor Caulfield and everything like an 18-year-old girl who needs Chloe’s help getting to safety before the storm blasts them to pieces. It’s not a sight that Chloe ever thought she’d see again, and she feels at the same time awful for its return and honored that she gets, despite everything, yet another chance.

For however long she has it, she’s going to do right by it.

She unbuckles her seatbelt – Moses is a safe driver, he’s probably going five below right now, anyway, and she crawls awkwardly across the middle seat until she can touch Max’s inner elbow. Max doesn’t startle, she doesn’t react at all. Her hands are in her hair, alternating between clutching at the roots and digging into her scalp with her fingernails. Now that she’s close enough, Chloe can see that she isn’t crying, really, just breathing like she is, hard and fast with her mouth fallen open. Her eyes are wide, enough that Chloe can see the whites all around each iris, and her expression is stock still. She looks like a rabbit freezing in place, staying as still as she possibly can and not making any noise anymore, not even from grinding her teeth together.

“Hey, Max,” she says. “Hey. Max, look at me. You’re okay. I’m right here, can you hear me? We’re in Moses’s car.”

“You’re dead,” Max says. “He shot you. You died and you’re going to die again.”

“I’m right here. See? No bullet hole.”

“Rachel’s dead, too. In the junkyard, in a trash bag. Chloe, I don’t want you to die.”

Chloe, a little more firmly than she’d like, takes one of Max’s hands and reels it away from her face, then presses it to the side of her own neck, holding it there and hoping that Max can feel some sort of racing pulse through the haze of drugs and panic. “Not going anywhere, hippie. No Dark Room. No storm. No bathroom. Me and you. Max and Chloe. I’ll remind you as many times as you need to hear it.”

Max doesn’t say anything after that. Honestly, Chloe suspects she’s blacked out maybe twenty minutes ago, and won’t remember a thing that she says, but you don’t love a time traveler as long as she has without seeing the value of doing things nobody will remember, not even you. If there is a force keeping track out there, if there’s eyes on them looking on dispassionately from the outer rings of space, doling out powers and bad turns and second chances and dead dads, they’ll see that Chloe kept Max’s hand resting right over her pulse point the whole drive back to Caledon.

It’s not a long drive, though. Pretty soon, Moses is parking in his assigned spot (fancy) in front of the science building, and Chloe pries herself away from Max to exit and walk around the back of Moses’s hybrid to help get Max out. She looks a little better, but also much more tired, all the fight, flight, freeze gone out of her so she’s just boneless in her seat, checked out and ready to be tucked in.

Chloe really doesn’t trust Max to walk up the approximately ten million stairs up to the actual building, so she unbuckles her from her seat, then turns around to drape her arms over Chloe’s shoulders. At least Max goes with the script here, getting a piggy back ride trips a lot fewer bad experiences in her addled brain than being hauled up into a car. She puts her legs on either side of Chloe’s hips, then tips her head forward onto Chloe’s back and lets herself be schlepped up some stairs.

Moses hovers nearby, probably worried that Chloe’s about to trip over her own two feet and brain both herself and Max in one fell swoop, but that only shows how limited even his gigantic and wrinkly brain is. Chloe has more Max Caulfield carrying experience than anyone else on the planet. She could probably win a gold medal at carrying Max Caulfield, and she should win a gold medal at carrying Max Caulfield. Piggy back, princess, fuck it, fireman, she’s got this. Who even needs rewind powers?

She stubs her toe on a stair almost all the way to the top and says, “Fuck!” really loud. She doesn’t fall, but she does have to hop in place to keep her balance.

“Do you have her?” Moses asks.

“Yup, I have her, just – get the door? Please?”

Moses, saint that he is, gets the door, and Chloe carts Max inside. The way she’s slumped over Chloe’s back has her thinking she’s probably already most of the way asleep, and that’s good. If she has another freakout, Chloe is going to sit down on the ground right alongside her and have a good, long cry about everything.

The audio track plays as soon as Moses unlocks the door to the planetarium for them, and he cringes and pats around the controls to shut it off. “Sorry, that probably woke her up, didn’t it? I forgot to turn off the automatic play option.”

It did wake Max up, but not by much. She groans against Chloe’s shoulder and starts to slip vaguely downward, so Chloe has to rush over to the nearest cozy-looking seat and deposit her before she rouses fully and gets the yipes again.

“Nah, turn it back on, that’s perfect. You’ve got that golden voice, it’ll knock her out like a lead pipe.”

He seems pretty suspicious about that, but he resests the track while Chloe settles on her knees in front of Max. She’s pretty limp, but being put down seemed to have fully woken her, and when she opens her eyes, her pupils are still very dilated, so they aren’t out of the rabbit hole yet.

“How are you holding up, space cadet?”

“Mmmppph,” Max says with her mouth closed. “We’re outside?”

“The observatory. I thought you might enjoy a lowkey light show while Moses and I work on some theories in the other room. Think you can swing that?”

“Ugh. What are we swinging?”

Despite how shitty everything is, it’s hard not to laugh. “No swinging, you can stand down. Do you think you can try to get some sleep out here while Moses and I do some brainstorming in the other room? Keep the roof on this place in one piece?”

It’s honestly kind of in poor taste for her to say that, but Max isn’t in the place to call her out on it. She nods, her head dipping towards her collarbone, and boy howdy, if she isn’t out for the count already, she isn’t long for the world of the living if the sonorous tones of Moses’s narration have anything to say about it.

She doesn’t really love leaving Max like this. She can’t stop herself from worrying about what will happen if Max wakes up still tripping and Chloe isn’t there to talk her back down, or if she needs a water or to be sick somewhere discreet, but Max is a big girl who has been surviving without Chloe’s presence well enough for years now. She can manage sleeping in a comfortable chair for a few hours while they crack some space-time mysteries a few floors away.

Moses is waiting for her in his office, picking at his nails. He’s a skittery guy, she’s learning, but that’s alright, so is Bash, and Moses smells much better than she does.

“She’ll be alright, she just needs to cool off and get some rest.”

He smiles without showing any teeth, although it seems forced to her eyes. “Should we… call someone? Her parents?”

“She’s an adult,” Chloe says. “Plus, it’s not like Ryan and Vanessa are going to drop everything and fly out here from Seattle because their grown ass daughter is having a bad trip.”

There’s a question in Moses’s face, but he hems and haws about asking it before he breaks and feeds his curiosity. “Do you know them well? Max’s parents? I’ve always wondered, she doesn’t talk about her family at all.”

“The Caulfields? Yeah, we go way back. Like, kindergarten, way back. She’s not very close to them, that’s all, no bad blood. They’re kind of very Irish Catholic, you know.”

“They don’t approve of your relationship?”

“What? Oh, no, I don’t mean, like – they aren’t religious nuts, they’re just super repressed. They don’t know how to talk about tough things outside of funerals, and even then they haul ass quickly. You know they still send me a Christmas card every year? Even after Max and I broke up, every December 24th, bam. Christmas card. Happy holidays from us to you! They’re not healthy people.”

Moses has a quiet laugh that’s more air than sound. “That explains some things about Max.”

“Oh, the avoidance issues? The guilt? Yeah, she comes by that shit honestly.”

Another beat of silence as he considers the next burning question on his mind, then he says, “I did read the court case. Mark Jefferson? She wasn’t mentioned as one of his victims.”

“Other timeline,” she says. “You’ve probably picked up on that already, right?”

He nods. “She said you died.”

“He shot me. She told me that much. And he took her for a very special photoshoot in his own personal studio. That’s… Rachel – she was my – she died because of him. Other than that, Max never really told me that much about what happened back there. I’ve asked, but…”

“Avoidance issues,” Moses deduces.

“Avoidance issues. Why talk about it if it didn’t even happen, right?”

He nods, not saying anything else, but clearly waiting for her to keep spilling her guts.

“It’s not like I don’t trust her,” Chloe says. “It’s not like she has to tell me about stuff that happened over a decade ago, in another reality. But even if it didn’t happen here, in this reality, it still happened to her. And I always felt like she didn’t trust me with knowing what happened, with knowing what it felt like for her to go through it. Like, I know I’m kind of a screw up, but she doesn’t need to protect me from –” she shakes her head. “Anyway. Here we are.”

“And now Max is a photography teacher.”

“And now Max is a photography teacher! Fuck, that girl is scary good at compartmentalizing. Avoidance, guilt, and compartmentalizing, that’s Max Caulfleld in three words.”

“The building blocks of a hero complex,” he says. “You see it all the time. Mostly in anime, but she can be the exception that makes the rule. I’m going to see if I can borrow some whiteboards from the chem lab so that we can get to work. You want to come with?”

“You go ahead,” she replies. “I’ll hold the fort. See if I can get all our leads in one place by the time you get back.”

Moses nods. When he leaves, Chloe is alone in the bright, glaring lights of the office-cum-time lab. Tomorrow is the day of the fire, according to Max’s experience of the future, and very possibly the last day she has as a fully living participant in the world outside of the scary void beyond time. Better make the most of the night.

. . .

The paramedic, who is a very nice young guy who looks about sixteen years old and is in the process of failing to grow a mustache, asks them to separate so that he can see Max more thoroughly, which is probably for the best, but also? Hard fucking no. Over her dead fucking body, actually.

They haven’t stopped holding hands. If Chloe has any say in it, they aren’t going to stop ever. They’re probably going to hold hands so long that they’ll have to be buried in conjoined coffins. But Chloe can’t hold back her coughing for more than a few minutes at a time, and Max hasn’t really been one hundred percent since they stepped away from the building, her nose bleeding sluggishly on and off and her eyes glazed in that burned-out, blown gasket way that Chloe hasn’t seen in… fuck, a decade, really. They need the attention, whether she likes it or not.

“Can you see Moses and Safi first?” Max asks. She sounds like she’s trying hard to keep it together, but her free hand is pressed to the bridge of her nose and her face is tipped up to keep the blood from running into her mouth when she speaks. “We’d like to stay together.”

The paramedic looks like he’d like to argue, but another medic calls him to one of the ambulances, so he just grimaces at the two of them and says, “Fine, but don’t go anywhere. I’ll be right back.” And then he rushes off to where they have Noelle on a gurney, oxygen mask over her face.

Max grumbles. “He’s going to think I have a concussion.”

“I’ll believe that you don’t when you can put one foot in front of the other without help, hippie.”

“I’m just tired. You’re the one who jumped off of a building.”

“Fell.”

Max glares at her, which at least means the unfocused look in her eyes resolves into something other than blurry exhaustion for a moment. “Don’t ever do that again. You hear me, Chloe Price? I’m not kidding. What were you even thinking, going over the railing like that?”

“I was thinking that you needed to focus, and that you couldn’t do that with me in your way. And you rose to the occasion! Like you always do.”

Max puffs out her cheeks, like she only does when she’s very mad and is trying hard not to start stamping her feet or yelling. “You’re – ugh. My head hurts too much to talk about this right now. Don’t ever –”

Chloe squeezes her hand. There’s a burn on the back of her thumb that sings whenever she does that, and she tries to use the pain to keep her mind clear. “I won’t. I promise.”

“Okay.” Max breathes deep, getting as much air as she can in, and then out. She coughs, spattering blood on the collar of her shirt. “Okay. Chloe, I was so scared. I thought I was going to lose you again.”

“You won’t. I’ve got you, and you’ve got me, right?”

“Right.”

The paramedic comes back shaking his head. “Sorry, it can’t happen right now, we don’t have enough people on hand. You’re going to have to be seen separately or not at all.”

Reluctantly, Chloe splits their hands apart. With the sweat and the grip they held onto each other with, their skin sticks together along each palm as they let go, and her fingers feel stiff and numb now that they’re not entwined with Max’s. “It’s alright, you go first.”

Max insists, “She fell off of the observatory, you should check her first,” but her nosebleed is back with a vengeance now, and no amount of tipping her head back or pinching the bridge of her nose stops the fresh gout from running past her lips and down her chin. “It’s just dry.”

“Then we’ll be able to get through this quickly,” he says, already ushering her towards the nearest available gurney to sit. 

Chloe waits. Her thumb hurts, as does her throat, and every time she looks over at Max across the way and over the shoulders of multiple strangers, her chest feels like it’s going to stave in, she loves her so much. She stands in the parking lot, feeling mostly useless and, more than that, very tired and aching all over. Her back already protests from the hard landing, and tomorrow morning, she will wake up with a whole rave of bruises over her body that will need to be iced and babied for days on end, because she isn’t twenty-two anymore and can’t party in a burning building without repercussions.

But right now, right here: Chloe Price is alive. The world gapes its mouth in a stupid grin and spits fire like a drunk opening act throwing up onstage, and Max Caulfield loves her, and Chloe Price is still alive. For now, that is enough.

She doesn’t get a lot of time to stand around, feeling stiff and sore and happy to be alive, because around that point, the brotester committee comes around to join the injured masses, or at least some of the committee does. 

All the espionage and infiltration in the world could not help her in identifying which of these dudes are CaledonSuxx69 or TownieCirclejerk95 or whatever else these guys were calling themselves online in front of God and everyone, but she quickly spots her bestest buddy Lucas leading the charge (Joey must have cleared out quick as soon as the fire started up) and, trailing behind and looking very sheepish to be in such company, one of Max’s students. Reggie, she remembers his name is. He was one of the suspects, which feels a bit ridiculous now looking at him, because he looks to be maybe twenty-one, if she’s generous, and sports an absolutely adorable piercing she usually only sees on lesbians.

“Heeeey,” she calls out to the motley group, spreading her less-burned hand out in a welcoming gesture. “Welcome to the party! Did you bring me a present?”

Lucas keeps his professor-y attitude in perfect condition, even framed against the background of a college campus burning down. It’s almost enough to make her feel bad to break it to him like this, but he is, after all, a raging douche.

“I didn’t see you at the protest,” he says. “But not everyone has the gumption to –”

She cuts in by sucking her teeth and saying, “Yeah, no, sorry, it wasn’t my kind of scene. I’m more of a mosh pit kind of girl, you know? Maybe next time, if you protest something cooler.”

The professor-y expression diminishes, but does not completely drop. “I don’t believe we’re on the same page.”

“I really hate to break it to you like this – okay, I really love breaking it to you like this, I’ll be honest with you, junior – but you got honeypotted. Infiltrated. There’s a mole in your midst. Your ranks have been penetrated. Deeply.”

At this point, the spirit of intellectual rigor leaves Lucas Colmenero’s face, and in its place it leaves an expression like he’s trying to swallow a lemon whole, peel and all. “I see,” he says. “My lawyers would advise me to stop speaking with you at this moment.”

“There is no way you have a plurality of lawyers, dude.”

She can tell that he’s tempted to respond to that, but props to him, he marshalls his resolve and stays clammed up, turning his back to her and walking with purpose towards the nearest group that isn’t the protesters he showed up with. She guesses the pressures of leadership finally got to him.

His departure leaves her with little baby Reggie, and – she notices with a bit more apprehension – a girl who she thinks might also be one of Max’s students. Blonde, with a beanie, holding a shotgun mic like it’s fully locked and loaded. She tries to not make eye contact with that one, she’s pretty sure Max told her the name before and she just forgot it, and it would be really awkward to have to ask for it now. She focuses her attention on lesbian piercing Reggie.

“Look who’s sober!” she says, reaching across and patting him on the shoulder. “Good to see you not in a creepy basement, right?”

“You’re in hot water,” Reggie says breathlessly.

“Uh,” Chloe starts, “fire, actually. Close!”

“No, no, I mean the, um,” he gestures in the vague direction of his own tit, “In Hot Water. The uh, on Crosstalk?”

“Oh! Oh, the strap boiling picture! Yes, yeah, that’s me.” Chloe strikes a pose approximating the one in the infamous photograph, miming resting her head on the palm of her hand and her elbow leaning on a kitchen cabinet, in front of a non-existent stove. The skin on her hand feels tight and hot, like she’s stayed out in the sun for way, way too long. “Sorry, I don’t do autographs. Yes, it’s a good tit. You’re one of Max’s students, right?” 

“I don’t know how I didn’t recognize you earlier.”

“In your defense,” Chloe says, “it was really dark, and you were on mushrooms.”

“Oh,” Reggie says, “yeah. Um, what are you doing here?”

Oh, man, where to start with that? Anything she says about the fire would imply some nonlinear chronology that visual arts undergrads are not prepared to hear, and she’s still a bit loopy from all the smoke she inhaled a little bit ago, so lying isn’t the best strategy right now. Better to stick to a simple truth, she figures. “I’m here to see Max.”

“I thought you guys were divorced?”

He says it with such an earnest expression that Chloe can’t help but let out a big bark of laughter that folds her all the way in half, coughing her lungs inside out. “Oh my God,” she says, between gulping breaths, “where did you hear that?”

“Loretta said so.”

The blonde with the mic says, “Hey!”

“And you’re never in any of her pictures anymore.”

Chloe shakes her head. Kids these days, they see one casual half-nude photoshoot making the rounds on social media, and they think that a girl is a muse or something. “I was never in any of her pictures anyway, not the formal gallery ones. She’s not a portrait photographer.”

“Well, no,” apparently Loretta says. She gets a little closer, brandishing her microphone in shaky hands as a barrier between them, don’t tap the aquarium glass-style. “But you can tell that she wasn’t taking most of Walking with Ghosts alone, right? There’s more than one set of footprints in the junk, there’s someone else just a little out of frame or barely peeking in. You can tell that there’s someone else in the room, like a seance.”

“Yeah,” Reggie continues. “Yeah, it’s like… lonely places, without being alone alone. It’s all about the contrast. But her newer stuff doesn’t have that anymore, so I always figured she dumped you.”

“I’ll have you know,” Chloe says, “I’ll have you know that I dumped her and I’m very sorry about it.”

Loretta continues, unabated, as though Chloe hadn’t said anything, “Plus, she has that divorced energy sometimes. It’s in the eyes, you can always tell when people are sad about their divorce by looking them in the eyes.”

“She’s even wearing a ring on her right hand. Who wears a ring on their right ring finger?”

“Divorced people, probably,” Loretta concludes. “Q.E.D.”

“Well, first of all,” Chloe starts. “First of all, that’s not a wedding ring, I gave it to her on our fifth anniversary and I know that it isn’t a wedding ring because I told her at the time that it wasn’t one. I said, don’t freak out, this isn’t a wedding ring. So it’s not one.”

Loretta nods and says, “And this is your strongest argument? This is the one you’re starting with?”

Chloe counts on her fingers. “Second of all, yes, I did help her break into buildings and shit for Walking with Ghosts, but you’re building a narrative that doesn’t exist. If Max wanted me in the pictures, she would’ve included me in the pictures, it’s not that deep.”

It’s like she can feel herself losing her audience, they’re looking at her with such incredulity.

“Lastly: I’ll be level with you,” Chloe says, “your mom and I were on the outs for a little bit, but we’re back together now and we’re stronger than ever. So jot that down in your little notepad, Nellie Bly.”

Reggie doesn’t seem entirely convinced by this, and Loretta looks wholly disbelieving, but you can’t win them all. 

He taps his foot on the asphalt, scuffing his nice hipster shoes, and asks, “Okay, if you really are together, could you ask her if I still have to submit this week’s assignment? Since the… campus is on fire, and I don’t know if we’ll have classes for the rest of the semester.”

“No, Reggie,” Max says, from somewhere behind Chloe, “you don’t have to submit this week’s artist statement, although you should consider still doing it, just to stay in the practice. You know what I say, art is 90% routine.”

When Chloe turns around to look, Max walks up with one of those astronaut blankets around her shoulders. It’s oversized and crinkly, but probably warm enough. You wouldn’t think that it would be so cold with a raging fire nearby, but it’s still early fall in New England, and they’ve both taken off their jackets for reeking to high Hell of chemical smoke. Well, Chloe’s jacket already reeked like smoke, but it’s really bad now.

“And 10% being where the bullshit happens,” Chloe shoots back. “They’re giving out free blankets over there?”

“They are. I’m in shock, apparently.” She shrugs, then lifts one of the corners of the blanket to Chloe beckoningly. “You want in on it?”

“You know it, beautiful.” Chloe seizes the end of the space blanket and hauls it over her shoulders, and it’s very uncomfortable under it, but she coils it around the both of them, tucking the end around Max’s neck so that she isn’t head and shoulders under crinkly foil, then presses their shoulders together for maximum heat sharing. “Sorry, kiddies, there’s only room for two.”

“No worries,” Loretta says. “I think we’ll probably make our way back to… there’s no way they’re letting us back in our dorms, are they?”

Max grimaces. “No, sorry. We were going to go stay at a motel for the night, it’s probably better that you do the same, at least until you get the all-clear.”

“Right. You coming, Reggie?”

“Yeah, just –” he pauses, halfway turned to follow Loretta to, presumably, some kind of transportation, and half turned to look at Max with his sad, wet eyes. “You’re going to be okay, right, Max?”

She smiles at him indulgently. As fucked as it is that she became a photography teacher after what Jefferson did to her – did to the both of them, really – it’s clear she loves it, and it’s clear that her students think the world of her.

“I’ll be okay, Reggie,” she says. “Chloe’s here to keep me out of trouble, now.”

Chloe tries to shoot the kid a reassuring grin, but that’s never worked for her before and she doubts it’ll work now. “I’m basically her medical alert animal, you know. She’s in good hands.”

“...Alright, but. Alright.” And he wanders off, walking all stiff and tight like a cat creeping past a dog kennel.

Once she feels he’s probably out of earshot, she pushes her weight against Max, and Max shoves her right back so that they rock in place, tittering.

“I’m glad your student wasn’t the one who set the school on fire,” she says. “He seems like a sweet kid.”

Max sighs. “He is, he just needs to stand up for himself more. Although he did drug me, so maybe he doesn’t need the help as much as I thought he did. I hope he can still graduate on time, with all,” she gestures all around them, “this crap.”

“Since when do you care about graduating on time, Professor Caulfield? You don’t even have a G.E.D.”

“Shut up, neither do you!”

They engage in another bout of hip-pushing, and then Chloe realizes that she’ll probably have to go to the paramedic soon. Her hand hurts, and her lungs feel like they’ve shrunk a size in the wash. They’ll probably say she can’t smoke, too, but whatever, she can just say that she vapes or something.

She asks, “So, did they fix your brain?”

“They cauterized my nose,” Max says, sounding harassed.

Chloe lifts both fists to the sky in victory, nearly dislodging the blanket she so carefully arranged just now.  “Close enough!”

“I also told them that you’re a smoker, so don’t try anything smart.”

“Professor Caulfield!” Chloe brings her hand to her chest, hanging her mouth open, eyebrows raised as high as she can get ‘em. “I’ll never get in as a student now that they know my worst vices!”

“Not even close to your worst vice. Your worst vice is that you lie in bed with your shoes on.” Low blow, but not inaccurate. “Your second worst vice is that, despite the universe and everything in it, you still keep finding me.”

“You’re a hard habit to break, prof.”

“Instructor.” Max tightens the blanket around the both of them and brings her free hand up to frame Chloe’s face. She is still wearing her ring, and it feels pleasantly cool against the hot, sunburned-feeling skin of Chloe’s cheek. “You’re having way too much fun with the teacher stuff.”

“Someone told me I have a problem with authority. Probably a therapist, I wasn’t paying attention.”

“You?” Max gasps, agog. “Never!”

It’s remarkably easy to touch the foreheads together, standing under one crinkly blanket like this. “Terrible attendance, too. You’re going to have to put me under academic probation. Strict probation. Very invasive.”

“I don’t know,” Max’s mouth tastes like smoke and salt when she presses her lips to Chloe’s, chastely, gently. “I don’t think you’re so bad. You just need to apply yourself more in class. I grade for participation, you know.”

“Max Caulfield, an easy A. How did I know?”

She tips her head back, rolling her eyes and rocking back on her heels as though making a mute appeal to the fates. “You sound like my boss.”

Chloe laughs. She winds an arm around Max’s waist and wonders how she ever lived this long without her arm around Max’s waist. “Who has a problem with authority now?”

“I never claimed to be a role model.”

“Say that to your students, they’re all signing up to be the next Everyday Hero as we speak.” Chloe cuts her eyes across the parking lot in the direction Reggie and Loretta went, but instead she lands on Lucas Colmenaro, who glares at them with the intensity of a man who well and truly believed he was going to have a rebound with a punk chick for a hot minute there. “Don’t look now, but I think we have an audience.”

Max does look now. She makes direct eye contact with Lucas, in fact. For a few seconds, she doesn’t do anything to provoke a reaction, just looks at him with purpose. Then, without any expression registering on her face, she brings her left hand up to frame her mouth, forming a V with her index and middle fingers on either side of her lips, and she sticks her tongue out at him.

. . .

“Hey,” Chloe says against the side of Max’s neck. “Try to get some sleep, alright? Close your eyes. If they’re anything like mine, they could use the break.”

Max doesn’t say anything right away. She lies on the left side of the bed– on the lefthand bed, rather. When they checked into the nearest motel room that still had availability with so much of the campus evacuated, the only rooms they could get just had twin beds, and it was a decision both unanimous and wordless to shove both of the beds together to make a shitty sort of queen bed with a precarious dip in the middle. Chloe is actually laying across that dip right now, braving the crevice so she can lean her head on Max’s bare shoulder, where her thin t-shirt sleeve slipped down, and get a good look at her face.

This close, Chloe can smell her, and it’s just as comforting as being able to look and touch, to feel warm skin under her cheek. They’ve both had showers, taken separately in a show of such fucking maturity and self-control from the both of them. They hadn’t let Max go back to her fancy ass cabin, even though it was upwind of the fire, so they weren’t able to get any of their shit, much less clothes to change into. There was a semi-trustworthy thrift store about ten minutes drive from campus, so at least Chloe has clothes for tomorrow, threadbare and suspect as they are, and a pair of semi-clean boxers plus a white tee to sleep in. Max basically has the same, although she ditched the boxers to sleep with her legs bare, which is nice, Chloe has to admit. The bedsheets are cheap as fuck and the blanket is scratchy and the fabric of the t-shirt she bought is rubbing against her nipples in a way she really isn’t into right now, but one of her legs is between both of Max’s, and whenever she moves at all, the hairs on their shins burr together like grasshoppers, and it’s nice. It’s familiar.

In the long list of stupid things Safi did, trying to pull the wool over her eyes had been maybe the stupidest. She didn’t feel like Max, of course, she didn’t hold her like Max holds her, or move like Max moves, or care like Max cares, but even without all that, if she moved perfectly and spoke just right and even memorized the way Max’s arms feel when they wrap around you, she still would’ve been shit out of luck. She didn’t smell like Max.

“Mm,” Max says, finally. She closes her eyes for a second, but her lids pop open right away like they’re spring-wound. “Sorry, I know I should sleep. I’m so tired, but every time I try to close my eyes, I feel like I’m going to start vibrating.”

“I wouldn’t mind a little vibration right now.”

Max snorts. “Chloe.”

“Yeah, I know. Time and place. But yeah, I get the feeling. I’m beat to shit, honestly, but I keep closing my eyes and thinking –”

“Did we do enough?”

It’s not exactly what Chloe has on her mind. She isn’t entirely convinced that, if she closes her eyes and relaxes, she won’t rebound right back into the bad, dark place behind her conscious mind, blink right out of bed and leave Max all on her own again. She wants to hold on to this reality with her teeth, second-degree burns and all, and she’s afraid. She’s terrified of what might happen when she unclenches her jaw.

“Yeah,” she says. “No casualties. That’s pretty good, right, Super Max?”

Max doesn’t answer. She looks up at the pitted ceiling of the motel room and seems both very small and awfully alone in the world. Chloe wriggles herself closer, moving past the dip where the two mattresses are pressed together to fully invade Max’s side of the bed. She pushes her face into Max’s throat, turning over onto her stomach so that she can lay half on top of her, sliding her left arm across the way so that she can rest her hand on Max’s hip, over her sleep shirt. She intends on keeping it there, but Max finds it with hers, and winds their fingers together. She briefly lifts their combined hands up to press her lips to the back of Chloe’s knuckles, then returns them to her side, sliding Chloe’s hand meaningfully under the fabric so it can climb, unassuming, across the hot, bare skin of her waist and lower ribs.

Max is a little softer here than Chloe remembers her being, a little less bony than she was at twenty-six and quite a lot less bony than she was at eighteen, when they were all fumbling hands and pretence and failing to play cool with each other, and Chloe could feel every notch in her spine through the fabric of her graphic tees. Now, Max newly twenty-nine, Chloe’s fingers sink pleasantly into her lower belly when she presses gently, earn her a hoarse laugh when she thumbs the fine hair growing around her navel. Her thighs are softer, too, and naked except for the thin line of Max’s cute boyshorts riding up around the crease of each hip. They’re soft enough for there to be a bit of give when she squeezes one, and she debates internally if she can get away with doing the same to her ass. What the Hell, she thinks, sliding her hand under Max’s body and feeling a great deal of kinship to her younger self of a decade past, she isn’t driving.

“Chloe,” Max says, her tone somewhat scolding, but it isn’t like she keeps her hands to herself, either. Her searching fingers find their way up the back of Chloe’s shirt, one hand staying at her lower back and the other exploring northward until her fingers find the curve of one shoulder blade and then run back down the slope of Chloe’s back, her nails digging a faint trail on their way down.

It isn’t really her choice to hiss, or to roll her hips down against the top of Max’s thigh, their legs still entwined. Neither of them are really in the position to really do anything exciting tonight, not according to the very nice paramedics who stuck hydrogel pads on Chloe’s side and the hand Max currently has resting on the small of her back. There were more pressing injuries to take care of, and by comparison, theirs are pretty minor, but that doesn’t mean that they were invited to start writhing and panting on top of each other without consequence. Already, Chloe can feel a cough climbing up her throat.

She mumbles a quick apology before pulling her face out of the warm dark hiding spot offered by Max’s neck and muffles a gross-sounding hack into the nearest pillow. As soon as she can pull back up, she offers a, “Remind me to quit smoking,” and her voice only sounds a little wrecked when she says it.

Max sighs. Chloe still lies half on top of her, and she tries to discretely shift her weight onto her shoulder so that she isn’t squishing her. It’s not like Max didn’t get her fill of smoke inhalation today, and it probably isn’t helping to have her lungs flattened by a hydraulic Price. She only gets partway through doing that before Max’s eyebrows furrow and she guides her right back in place on top of her, although this time she lifts her leg a little so that her knee presses ever-so-slightly against Chloe’s groin.

“I’ll remind you,” she says. “I don’t think rewind works on cancer cells, so.”

“Okay, but have you tried?” More on autopilot than anything else, Chloe starts rutting against Max’s knee. Not hard, just a little rubbing off, like scratching an itch. “I don’t think you tried. What if you tried.”

One of Max’s hands stays at the small of her back, but the other finds its way helpfully to Chloe’s ass, holding on to her upper thigh to subtly guide her grinding. “Slow down,” she says, “slow down for me. I’m going to cough on you if we go that fast.”

“You can rewind that too.”

Max laughs, but Chloe can feel her start to rock up in response, making smaller movements than Chloe is. She slows to match, sliding the leg she has between Max’s so that she can get a little friction, too. There’s a bit of height disparity here, but they’ve played this game before – in the back of a truck parked somewhere quiet, in other motel rooms, one lucky time even against a wall in a rusted out old warehouse they weren’t supposed to be in, Max rising up on her toes so that Chloe got enough friction through her torn up jeans to come. It’s been a while, and they’ve rarely done it moving this slowly, but it’s just a matter of remembering the steps. She lifts her upper thigh on her next thrust, that way Max gets more direct pressure. She’s kind of touch-and-go when it comes to penetration, most nights they had she couldn’t be bothered with it, but she always liked her lip bitten deep, her love bites bruising, her clit sucked hard. It’s hard to get much force moving at a crawl like this, rocking against each other like they have nowhere else to be, rubbing like glaciers moving past each other, but Chloe tries her best.

The hand Max has on her ass shifts, and Chloe is too busy getting that good eye contact to see what she’s up to, but she can feel it moving between them, groping for her own shorts and sliding them down one leg, as far as she can go without separating, and then doing the same with Chloe’s boxers. Max isn’t able to get them down past her thighs, so Chloe spares a hand to help her get them the rest of the way down, then hastily kicks them off the bed before rushing back where she left off. 

Max, however, has different plans in mind. She shifts under Chloe, giving herself enough space to pull her shirt from the bottom up, getting it over head and then casting it aside. Chloe doesn’t have a lot of time to enjoy the view before Max goes to do the same to her, sitting up at the waist and partially unseating her to roll her shirt up to her chest. She moves quickly, seemingly too quickly, because she gives out a raspy, breathy noise and needs Chloe’s help to get it the rest of the way off while she gets hold of the subsequent coughing jag. Nothing between them now, Chloe leans her weight off of Max’s lap to reach behind her and rub circles between her shoulders.

“What happened to slow?”

“Sorry,” Max says, then clears her throat. “I just – I didn’t want anything between us right now.”

It’s so sappy. It’s so Max. Chloe keeps one hand on her back and tips her backwards with the other one, settling back over her so that they’re lying down again, one of Max’s legs hooked over her hip, but not at an extreme angle or anything, just folded together gently, like putting together a puzzle without creasing the edges of any of the pieces. They’re lying on top of the other fully now, neither of them in the dreaded crevice between the mattresses, and really, they could’ve probably done this on a twin bed and saved themselves the energy, but here they are now. Chloe lowers down until her forehead rests on top of Max’s, and yeah, it was a good choice to shed layers. She rolls her hips once, angling so that they press together directly now, and Max is wet and soft and unchanged, just as perfect as she’s always been. On a second thrust, she shivers and gasps, her clit grazing the hood of Max’s clit, and Max shifts her hips this way and that, angles Chloe’s waist with one hand on her hip and the other on her ass, then rolls up and off the bed, following through with two shorter little thrusts, rubbing two raw nerves together with intent to light a fire.

“God, shit,” Chloe says. She closes her eyes tight enough to see colors behind her eyelids. “Fuck, that’s good.”

Max breathes, “You’re amazing. Hold on for me.” Then, after a few more slow, intense thrusts up against her that Chloe is only just barely able to match, she moans with her mouth closed, then hums. Stops, for a moment. Let’s go of Chloe’s hip and shifts her hand up, touching her lower ribs gently with the very tips of her fingers. “This is new?”

Chloe forces her eyes open, and reluctantly lifts her head from where she has it resting against Max’s to look down at herself. It’s hard to see in the dim lighting, but Max is tracing the outline of a tattoo of a bottle of pills and a mascara wand. It’s a few years old now, old enough that she’s started to forget about it.

“Yeah,” she says. “For my band. Drugstore Makeup, remember? I got it after we broke up.”

Haltingly, Max gets out the words, “I remember you always said you were going to get two whales here when you found the right artist. For your mom.”

The thing is, Chloe can kind of remember that too, now that Max has said it. It’s like having those old 3D movie glasses on. She closes one eye, and everything is red, the days of anger and loss after they found Rachel’s body, the need to move, Max and her and the world rebuilding on top of itself. Then she closes the other eye, and it’s all blue. Fleeing the wreckage of the town, Max and her hand in her lap as she drives, knuckles gone white from holding on so tight. Her mother’s last will and testament. The months and years of lying in the welter of their guilt. She keeps both eyes open.

“Don’t think about it now. Be here, right now, with me.”

Max breathes in through her nose and out through her mouth, long and slow to keep her breath from hitching. She nods. “Okay. I’m here.”

“I’m here too.”

Max smiles. It’s a good smile, one of Chloe’s favorites, the one that means she’s about to say something big and good and important. “I love you, Chloe.”

When Chloe lowers her face even more so that they can press their lips together, Max’s mouth still tastes a little like the cheap travel toothpaste they got at a gas station. She parts to say, “I love you, Max.”

“I’m happy you’re here now.”

Don’t get weepy, Price. “I am, too.” She sniffs hard before she can drip anything on Max’s face. “Now, are we going to bone, or are we just touching clits for emotional support?”

“Chloe, don’t call it boning. We’re… so old.”

“Shall we make love like a boring old couple, then? Bump uglies?”

Max offers a wheezy little laugh that makes Chloe’s chest hurt. “Chloe Price, there’s not a single ugly thing about you.”

“That’s a stone cold lie, and you know it, Caulfield.” But she picks up the rhythm again, rutting against Max, who rises up to match her on the next thrust.

They keep at it like that, moving slowly, slowly, to keep from having to catch their breaths. It’s tempting to speed up, to go a little harder, to give Max more the way she knows Max would like more, and she’s so wet, they both are, sliding against each other, but if she can’t go any faster, she shoots for deeper. Every time she drives her hips against Max’s, she pushes a little harder, grinds in a little more before coming up for air, and Max meets her in kind, her controlled breaths slipping out with stuttery moans whenever her clit rubs over Chloe’s. Chloe, for her part, doesn’t do any kind of holding back, and she can hear just how much the smoke has had its effect every time she whines aloud and feels her lungs straining to keep up, her voice cracking. It feels like they’re going to shudder apart, like boats do in rough water, or else pour into each other and sublimate into hot air, into glowing steam, but instead they just keep going, not so much kissing as they are panting into each other’s mouths, until Max slides her hand up the length of Chloe’s spine so that she’s cradling her juddering shoulder, then drags her fingers back down, digging her nails in for one long, uninterrupted stroke all the way to Chloe’s hip and Chloe comes like she hasn’t in three years.

It’s a long, slow, melting kind of orgasm. It hits her hard, at first, and she clacks her teeth together for fear that whatever comes out of her throat right now will be hacking, but it flows into a warm, pleasurable heat in her lower belly that clenches and relaxes, waxes and wanes. Max rocks her through it, rolling her hips up into her as Chloe stutters and rabbits through the aftershocks, then slumps her wet face into the crook of her Max’s neck with a low moan.

“Mm. Good?” Max asks. She’s untangling their legs slowly, giving Chloe a chance to catch up to herself.

“Good,” she says, her voice breaking down the middle of a single syllable. Every time Max tries to pull her leg out from between Chloe’s, she can feel that Max is so wet from both of them that she’s slick halfway down her thigh, and she twitches and jerks against nothing at the realization. “God, Max, so good. Can I – please?”

Max’s throat bobs and she nods, taking her nails out of Chloe’s lower back. “Yeah, of course. Yeah, you can –” she swallows the rest of the sentence and parts her legs, which is more than clear enough communication.

Even though Max’s body is not all as Chloe remembers it, her thighs fuller in her hands, between her legs, it’s like no time has passed at all. She still has the trail of fine hairs leading from her navel down to her cunt for Chloe to follow with her lips and her tongue, and the brown curls still frame her inner thighs and labia, lying damp and fragrant for her to bury her face into. She still smells like Max – just as addicting as she’s always smelled, and when Chloe parts her mouth to run her tongue from her entrance up to her clit in one uninterrupted stroke, she tastes the same when soaked through with both her own and Chloe’s slick.

Max’s hands twist in her hair as she lets out a hoarse whine and starts to rock up against the suction Chloe has around her clit. When Chloe parts for a moment to start forming a question, she quickly interjects, “No, don’t you dare! No fingers. You have a – ah! A burn on your thumb, you dummy.”

Oh, Chloe forgot about that. She muffles a laugh in Max’s thigh, and says, “Thanks, Maximum the Hormone. You didn’t rewind, right?”

Max snorts. “No, I just know you a little bit. Chloe, please. I’m close.”

Chloe doesn’t really need her to say that to know. The grinding got her most of the way there already, and with how she’s writhing on the mattress, pushing up against Chloe’s mouth whenever Chloe laves the flat of her tongue hard across her clit and then circles it with the tip, she isn’t going to last long. This, too, is familiar grounds, worn and loved and safe. She could drown right here and be perfectly happy, no rewind tricks necessary, so long as she got to go with the heady scent of Max’s wetness all around her.

She isn’t a tease, though, she knows what Max wants right now. She purses her lips around her clit again and sucks around, more than a little meanly, and rests her hand, the one with the burned thumb, over Max’s lower belly as she pulls a whimpering orgasm out of her. She only lowers her mouth to press kisses to her entrance as she clenches around nothing, to drink up more of her wetness, and God, Chloe’s so lucky she gets to have this again. That she gets to taste Max, to feel her fingers pulling hard at the roots of her hair, to hear her cry out in a breathless, dry as a fire crackling wail and then tighten her thighs on either side of Chloe’s head, holding her in like a breath. To think that she spent years denying the both of them this, that just earlier today, she could’ve died without having had this again, that she could’ve left Max to a lifetime of coming on a tongue belonging to some fuck who isn’t Chloe Price, that they could’ve lived their whole lives without knowing this again, that they could’ve spent the rest of their lives cut in half and bleeding out, that she could’ve forgotten a decade of shared guilt and left Max to do this on her own. That she left Max.

She keeps her face between Max’s legs, even after she’s done riding out the shivers and aftershocks, even after her breathing has evened out and her thighs have loosened around Chloe’s ears. It’s nice here. It’s safe waters. Here, she can pretend that no time at all has passed, that everything is the same as it once was, that she hasn’t squandered anything. That time doesn’t exist between Max’s legs, where everything is warm and soft and smells like her. Maybe if she plays her cards right, she can stay right here forever.

She buries her face in the juncture of Max’s thigh and stays there, hoping Max can’t feel her sniffling. But Max does, obviously, and Chloe feels the grip she has on her hair turn to petting, turn to soothing.

“Hey?” she calls, her voice still a little shaky. “Hey, Chloe. Look at me?”

“Sorry,” Chloe says immediately, looking up at the same time she smears a mostly clean hand under her eyes. Fresh tears spring up to replace the mess she’s made of her face, so it’s entirely pointless, but she can’t bring herself to look Max in the eyes without shielding herself a little first. “I’m sorry, I just— I’m sorry.”

“Chloe,” then, “baby, it’s okay. Shh, it’s okay, you can cry.”

“Mmnot crying.”

“Chloe.”

“No, I am. Sorry.”

“That’s okay. Don’t be sorry.”

“No, I mean,” Chloe sniffs hard enough that she gets a spike of pain through her sinuses. “Max, I should have come here the first week after we broke up. The first day. I wasted so much time.”

Max opens her mouth, then closes it. Her eyes flick up to the ceiling, as though looking for answers in the unseen stars, and then she looks back down. Her eyes are damp, but not wet. Funny that, after this whole stupid weekend, the only time Chloe has seen her shed actual tears was just a few hours ago, on the roof. Even in the basement, having the hallucinogenic experience of a lifetime, though she sagged and she sobbed, her face stayed dry. Eventually, she just says, “Come up here?” in such a soft, pleading way that Chloe doesn’t stand a chance.

She crawls up the bed to rest her cheek on the top of Max’s tits, feeling like a big, sad dog left in the rain, and Max puts her arms around her, cradling her head. Just being in Max’s arms this way has her feeling better, although much meltier. She doesn’t even try to sniff back the tears this time, dribbling onto Max’s chest and her forearms and probably getting on her bandages.

“Don’t be sorry,” Max says.

Right into her tit, Chloe mutters, “Stupid fucking postcard.” because having Max’s arms around her always makes her feel small and safe and like she can show her ass without being punished for it. “I don’t know why you’re not more mad at me. I was furious at you, when you left.”

“Yeah, for like, fifteen minutes, tops.” Max snorts, and resumes stroking Chloe’s hair back and out of her eyes. “You were also nineteen, Chloe. I’m a big girl with another decade under my belt. I can feel my stuff a little more quietly.”

“Yeah, I guess we can’t all be big blubbery babies like I am.”

“Chloe,” Max cups her face, so that the cheek that isn’t pressed to the top of her tit is cradled in her hand, thumb tucked under her jaw to bring her face up. “I like that you don’t hold back with me.”

“I have full eyes.”

“I love your full eyes.”

“It’s not very punk rock, going right from eating out your girlfriend to sobbing on her tits without even a snack break. You’ve, what, shed two tears in three days? You’ve definitely earned it more.”

Max’s hand stalls, and she firms her hold on Chloe’s chin before Chloe can start to duck her face away. “I don’t think you need to earn that, Chloe. I don’t think either of us do, it’s just – it’s harder for me. Sometimes, it’s like I can feel the tears start to come, but they get stuck, and it’s like,” she takes her hand out of Chloe’s hair to make a frustrated gesture at her own neck, “it’s like there’s something lodged in my throat and I can’t breathe around it. And I get trapped there for so long. That’s what it felt like after the storm, for me. I couldn’t start to… push anything out, or let anything in, I was just stuck.”

Once again, Chloe considers her mental 3D glasses. One lens: all red, Max holding her tightly in her arms in the days and weeks and months after they finally buried Rachel, so tight that Chloe couldn’t do anything stupid, the trial afterwards, the way they both burst out of the town together like they were escaping a burning building, they needed to be somewhere they could both breathe. The other lens: all blue, the depression spiral and endless motel rooms, avoiding Max’s parents because they would ask too many questions, lying in each other’s arms under humming lights, evacuating to other worlds like refugees. Both times, together, always together. Both times, Max’s face, as white as a sheet and as dry as a bone.

Max returns her hand to Chloe’s hair, massaging her scalp with the backs of her squared-off fingernails. “I do cry sometimes,” she says, conversationally. “I cried when Safi died. I cried when you left.”

Chloe doesn’t say anything.

Delicately, Max tips her face up so that they’re looking at each other, then leans down to press a kiss to Chloe’s forehead. “I know I’m not… I’m not completely the same Max you remember. We have different memories of how the last decade went, I don’t want you to think mine is real and yours is bullshit.”

“I can remember both,” Chloe insists. “I might just need some reminding every now and then, okay? But you need to remind me. I don’t want you to remember it all by yourself, you shouldn’t have to be alone with it.”

The smile Max gives her isn’t wet, but it wobbles a little, like it’s thinking of being weepy, just a bit. “Even though I’m not your Max anymore? Even if I’m different now?”

“You’ll always be my Max.”

“Okay,” her Max says, “okay.”

. . . 

They take a break somewhere near the Great Lakes for Max to take a breather, since there’s already no way they’ll make it in time for Shakes Spear Tavern in Wyoming. If it was just Chloe, she’d chug a couple of shady gas station energy pills and zip through the upper part of these beautiful United States of American’t, but even her habitual lead foot can’t stomach the idea of driving recklessly with Max sitting shotgun, so she’s driving with remarkable patience, and taking all sorts of little breaks here and there to stay refreshed, like a responsible adult driver.

Adult Driver (2017), starring Chloe Price and Max Caulfield. Is that anything? No. No, that’s nothing.

There are other benefits to taking breaks this often. Max hasn’t actually been sitting shotgun that frequently since they started on the road. She’s had an off-and-on migraine from the moment they crossed the border to Massachusetts, and watching her grimace against daylight in the front seat made Chloe’s bones hurt, so she’s largely been lying in the backseat of the van, one of Chloe’s cleaner black tees thrown over her head to block out the light.

Fresh air seems to help. She’s over by the viewpoint now, doing Max stuff, which is largely looking at everything, touching everything, taking pictures of everything, and occasionally pointing stuff out to Chloe. The last one she’d been politely asked to come look at was a pair of funky-looking ducks floating out on the water.

“Chloe, look!” she’d said. “Us!”

This is another benefit of being enclosed in a car together, barreling across these beautiful United States of America. Nobody else has to suffer the honeymoon stage except the two of them and the occasional, deeply unfortunate fellow traveler sharing the rest stop with them. They have free reign to point at every misshapen stump or unaddressed pothole and say, “You!” or, more regularly, a pair of truly repulsive keychains hanging next to each other on a roadside stand and say, “Us, if we were ugly knicknacks.”

It’s good that they air this out before they link back up with Drugstore Makeup. Nobody should be exposed to levels of gloop this potent without wearing PPE.

Still. Max is doing better than she has been all day, and she’s over there, turning over any corner that can be turned over and even some that can’t, and Chloe takes the opportunity to briefly address the elephant in the back of the van. Which is to say, the disorganized heap of ephemera that passes for Max and her collective stuff.

At least Chloe’s stuff is mostly in one bag. Max had to pack up her whole life in a matter of a few days before they set off, and while it is a much smaller life than Chloe expected, it still is kind of a mess back there. She has one box just dedicated to pictures and carefully bubble-wrapped cameras and lenses, an art sculpture she refused to leave behind after winning it in an auction, and exactly one box full of everything else, including clothes, utensils, and books, all jammed together without any rhyme or reason. Every time Chloe takes a turn a little too hard, she hears all that shit knocking around together, and even if Max’s migraine is lifting a little, that clanging and banging is giving Chloe a stress headache.

At least they didn’t have to hitch Max’s Toyota shitcan to the back of Chloe’s shitcan of a van. Max had bought the wretched thing with cash and back into the cash economy it went, with such ease that it would make you cry out, “Wow! A 1995 Corolla? You shouldn’t have!”, so that covers gas money and hotel stays for the next little while. 

The stuff banging around inside the miscellaneous box ends up being a couple of journals half-heartedly tied together with paracord and forced to bunk with a set of plates, which is bad even for Max. Chloe picks up the journals and lays them down on the car floor before adjusting Max’s winter clothes to act as a barrier between the fragile stuff and the harder, clunkier stuff, and then unties the paracord to actually fit the journals inside snugly without a shoddy Shibari arrangement going on. She packs in two journals, one with a stag and Max’s full name embossed on the cover, fan-cy, and pauses on the third, recognizing it.

She holds the journal up to the light to look at it better. It’s a weirder one, one that Max didn’t write in with the most regularity, but Chloe’s always thought of it as her working-shit-out journal. Not a consistent everyday buddy, but a dependable one, one she’s even let Chloe jot stupid shit in sometimes. Max, for all her scrapbooking and hoarding habits, has never been very precious about her journals. It’s not like she ever said, hey, Chloe, come take a look at what I’ve written here about you, but if she was adding to it and Chloe came around to look over her shoulder, she’d just shrug and keep working. Chloe looks over to where Max is, and sees her kneeling down to examine the underside of a picnic table, then figures that taking a peep inside for old times’ sake probably wouldn’t bother her too much.

This journal has one of those built-in ribbon bookmarks, and Chloe opens it to the page last visited, more or less halfway through the journal.

She’s met with what a less charitable person might call “school shooter core”. It’s far from the soft watercolor and twee handwriting Max tends towards, all black ink, scratchy screaming faces and open mouths, skulls and crossed out words, only a few sentences legible at all through the mess of aborted ideas and abandoned designs. When she touches the page to turn it, she can feel that the pen gouged marks into the paper, as well as the page after it. Jesus.

She turns a few pages back. There’s more regular stuff, watercolor illustrations and scattered recollections of events. A long period of time not covered at all, either not worth talking about or not worth being remembered. And then, after another page dented by the previous one’s aggressive penmanship, another page in all black and white, this one less chaotic than the last one, but more abstracted. Dozen, maybe hundreds of curving hatch marks creating a spiral or a twister, and in the eye of the storm, as clear as a time of death, lie the words she left me.

Chloe closes the journal and packs it with the others.

Max comes around not long after she’s taped the box back up and stowed it more securely this time, so that nothing bangs around inside even if her organization fails. “Is everything alright?” she asks, once she sees Chloe’s face. “Do you want to stop driving for the day? It’s almost sunset, we could find a motel nearby, or just sleep in the van if you want.”

“No, it’s alright,” Chloe says. “We should make it to Chicago pretty soon if we get moving. Ready to haul ass?”

She gets a smile, still unsure but warming up. “Ready if you are, captain.”

“Let’s set sail.”

. . . 

“Well, well, well,” Izzie says when she finally deigns to grace them with her presence, “look who’s back to fucking the photography man for photographs.”

“Photography woman,” Max corrects.

Chloe helps her set up the instruments for the shoot, standing in place for Bash at the drums before getting up to give Izzie the hug she damn well deserves after the shit Chloe put her through. “I thought maybe we stand a better chance getting gigs if we had an actual famous photographer taking our Crosstalk promo pics instead of your latest hookup shooting vertical video with their sweaty knuckles in the frame.”

Max says, “Semi-famous photographer.”

Izzie parts from the hug to lean around the microphone and scoop up her guitar, which Chloe had so carefully tuned and laid out just for her, hours ahead of the show. “Inasofar as any photographer is famous?”

“Robert Capa,” Max continues. She doesn’t look up from the tripod she’s futzing with to do it. “Diane Arbus. Kevin Carter. Dorothea Lange. Man Ray, arguably.”

Chloe says, “Name five more.”

“Platon. Stieglitz. Parks. Stoddard. We can probably count Dalí.”

“I don’t know, should we count Dalí? What do you think, Iz, are we counting Dalí?”

“Oh, God,” Izzie bemoans. “There’s two of them. And to think, I came in here happy that the two of you had figured it out. Egg on my face.”

“And it’s going to be like this forever,” Chloe says, and she can’t help but grin so hard her cheeks sting. “We’re never going to break up ever again. We’re going to be together for the rest of our natural lives. We’re going to stitch our faces together tomorrow.”

“Sounds like a recipe for a bad infection. Let me know if you find a good body modder who’ll do that for you.”

It’s weird, but Chloe is kind of nervous about this. When Max and Izzie last met, Drugstore Makeup were still pretty small fish and treading water after Steph left, and Chloe was little more than a jumped-up merch table lackey. Even then, they didn’t often run in the same circles, Max usually ducking out of concerts early so she could be ready for early morning photoshoots she’d been booked for. But now Chloe is a bona fide band manager, and a pretty successful one at that, so it matters that her girlfriend and her band members get along. She tries not to feel like a fretting pet owner, watching her two cats sniff each other through a bathroom door.

“I was hoping to get some solo shots of every member of the band,” Max says. “I’ve seen some of your footage, and it seems like you have a lot of great concert snapshots, but not any profile pieces introducing each of you to your audience. And a picture is worth a thousand words, right?”

“You don’t need to persuade me, girl,” Izzie says. She takes position at the mic, putting her arms out at her sides in a neutral stance. “How do you want me?”

“Hey,” Chloe says. It isn’t a warning, she couldn’t warn Izzie off a conquest if she wanted to, but she can at least make it known that she isn’t happy about it.

Max parts from her tripod to do a little directing, circling the set and considering Izzie from a variety of angles before saying, “Could you face this direction? I’m thinking the light could catch your face just right. And if you could hold that guitar?”

Izzie takes Max’s instruction far better than she’s ever taken Chloe’s, standing facing the light Max has set up in the right corner of the stage, so that her profile is to the camera. She lifts the guitar and holds it like she would when actually performing, but Max quirks her mouth in a way that means reality has failed to meet the perfect composition she had in her head.

“Actually, do you think you could hold it more upright? I want to make sure that the viewer is drawn to you, not the guitar. Lift the neck a little higher?”

Once again, Izzie does her best to comply, but the movement is stiff, and she cuts her eyes over her shoulder to Chloe at the drums, looking unsure about all this.

“It’s fine, Iz, just do what the semi-famous photographer says, and all will be at peace in the universe.”

“Alright, but if she asks me to strip, I’m leaving.”

Max snorts. “Keep as many layers on as you like, please. I don’t really do boudoir shoots, at least not professionally. Here, could I hold that for a sec?”

Oh, Jesus. Izzie does not like handing her guitar over to people, especially not people she doesn’t know very well. It took months and months for her to not raise her hackles whenever Chloe had the nerve to stow her guitar in the back of the van instead of letting her ever-so-carefully rest it in the front seat herself. Chloe prepares for a bout of bitching and hissing and having to apologize to both of them, but, to her surprise, Izzie just shrugs and passes the guitar over to Max.

“What?!” she says. “Iz, come on! You’re just handing it over!”

“What can I say, Price, she has the face of a guitarist. She’ll handle my baby well. Look at that face, you can trust her.”

“I have the face of a former guitarist,” Max says, but she takes up the precious cargo with some familiarity, one hand at the neck and the other at the body, at about a 90 degree angle to her torso. “I haven’t played in… jeez, like a decade. I don’t think I remember a single chord.”

“It’s like riding a bike,” Izzie reassures her. “Or crashing one, at least. Plus, now we’re even: I don’t know anything about photography, and you don’t know anything about Revstars. Clearly.”

“Is it that obvious?”

“A bit. You had a basic bitch acoustic, didn’t you?”

Max smiles, mostly sheepish, but also a bit nostalgic. “It didn’t survive the move, but it was my darling for a few years. At least I have my consolation prize, right, Chloe?”

“What, the Polaroid camera?”

“No, you, dummy.”

“Oh, sweet,” Chloe grins in her seat, content to be Max Caulfield’s consolation prize any day of the year that ends in Y. “Ditto.”

Max shakes her head, then shifts the guitar in her arms so that the neck is higher up, drawing the eye to her neck and face. Chloe starts to put together the pieces of what she’s aiming for with this photo, and seemingly, so does Izzie, since she takes the guitar back and mimics Max’s pose, albeit reversed.

“Perfect,” Max says. “Hold that pose.”

“Just let me know if you have any other notes for me, Professor Semi-Famous Photographer.”

Max settles back behind the camera, and even though Chloe can’t see her face very clearly from this angle, she’s seen Max snap pictures for so long that she can imagine her face behind it in perfect detail. She can imagine her forehead creasing with thought as she takes a few preliminary shots, considering how she might improve the lighting, the composition, achieve the desired effect. She can imagine her biting her lip in concentration, in as much detail as there would be without the tripod and the lens between them.

After hitting the shutter release button a few times, Max lifts her head. “Actually,” she says, “can I ask for one more thing? It might be a little difficult.”

“So this is where the stripping comes in, alright.”

Chloe says, “Hey.”

Max, laughing, hides her face behind the camera again, popping out of sight like a prairie dog. “Do you think you could try and relax a little? You’re a bit… wooden right now. I want it to feel like you look in concert, and you’re usually pretty loose when you’re singing. At least based on the footage you have on your socials.”

Izzie’s mouth twists, and she chews on her lower lip a bit, showing a hesitation that is, frankly, uncharacteristic of her. “It’s kind of hard for some of us, you know. Not everyone is naturally photogenic.”

“Everyone is photogenic,” Max insists. “Anyone can look genuine and alive in a photograph, it’s just a matter of it the photographer can capture it. Is there anything I could do to put you at ease?”

Chloe gets up and stretches her legs, leaving the drum kit to hover somewhere between Max and Izzie, hoping she can serve as a passable mediator here. “It’s kind of hard to remember if you haven’t spent half your life getting your picture taken by Caulfield here, but just try to remember it’s this goober behind the camera. Usually, when I remember that, it’s like the camera kind of goes away, and it’s just the two of us having a really oddly-spaced conversation, with weird sound effects.”

“That doesn’t sound very natural or easy,” Izzie says, dry as a rash.

“Okay,” Max cuts in. “What if we talked while I took some pictures? Would that help it feel more casual?

“You want to get a batch of pictures of me hanging my mouth open at you? Are you sure you know what you’re doing here?”

Max shoots Izzie a little smile, one of her more unassuming ones. It’s a winner, alright. “I promise you’ll look put together in the final image. Composed, even.”

Chloe says, “Booo.”

“Tell me a little bit about the concert you’ll be playing tonight?”

“Ugh, I’d rather we were playing at a dive bar,” Izzie starts. She’s already falling into a more comfortable stance, her shoulders falling away from her ears and her back bending at a slouch. “But we had to move some stuff around because of the delay someone saddled us with when she went to go pick up her ex-girlfriend spontaneously –”

“No regrets there,” Chloe says.

She hears the shutter of Max’s camera go off.

“So, instead, we’re playing at this foxhole. It’s a wine bar. A wine bar. Do we look like the wine bar crowd-pleasers to you?”

“I like wine,” Max says. Her shutter goes off again, twice in short succession. “And I like your music, so it seems like a pretty natural combination to me!”

“I could’ve guessed you were a wino. Probably comes with the territory of art galleries, with cheese squares on toothpicks and little cocktail weenies. What kind of wine do you like?”

Chloe groans. “Don’t start, her taste buds are fried. She likes the really gross kind, the kind that tastes like someone got murdered inside an oak barrel. Cab-savs and shit.”

“I like,” Max says, “tannin-heavy wines. This is apparently a crime for which I will be killed with hammers.”

“Ugh.” Chloe sticks out her tongue in distaste. “You don’t have to kiss yourself afterwards. You would eat out an ashtray if you thought you could get away with it.”

Max doesn’t contest this, but she does adjust her camera a little before returning to proper photo-taking position. “Not on a first date.”

“I like sweet wines,” Izzie says, which Chloe didn’t actually know about. For as long as she’s known Iz, she mostly either went dry or for sickly-sweet ciders. “But they give me headaches if I have more than a glass.”

“That’s why I like the heavier ones, you can’t go as hard with them.”

They chat like that for a little bit. Max taking a couple of pictures and asking a few questions at a time, then adjusting her angle of attack, shooting from this corner or that height, all subtle variations on the same pose. It works, as far as Chloe can tell: Izzie loosens up, and Max gets as many pictures as she’d like. Sometimes, Max lifts her head and directs Izzie a little here and there, gesturing with her hands for Izzie to shift her weight to her back leg or to try a different expression. The whole time she does this, she doesn’t touch Izzie once, doesn’t even come close to it. Chloe can’t tell if it’s usual Max-brand discomfort or if there’s a protocol here between artist and model that’s going over her head, but it isn’t usually like this when it’s her getting her pictures taken by Max, where Max is just as often lying on top of her with the camera between them, tipping Chloe’s face up by her chin and delicately positioning her this way and that. It’s kind of sexy, usually, getting to be both Max’s muse and her modeling putty, her armature, to be shaped by her hands any way she likes. It never occurred to Chloe to interrogate that before, that there was a reason for it, and for that reason to be anything other than simple and fun. That maybe even lying in bed together, pressed sweetly, the Dark Room could still be between them.

She tries not to think about it. She doesn’t have any reason to think about it, really, since things are going so well with Max and Izzie. Then, of course, her luck runs out, and Izzie decides to turn the tables on them. It figures. You can’t expect a lead singer to be predictable for very long.

“Can I ask you something?”

Max says, “Sure,” not really looking at Izzie at all, mostly at her camera, at the lighting, at the pictures she’s already taken.

“So… the Max Caulfield I keep hearing about is a landscape photographer, not a portrait artist. What made you change?”

And isn’t that just like Iz, cutting right to the heart of the matter.

“Landscape and portraiture aren’t that different, at least not in their intentions. They’re both about documentation, about capturing a moment, or a feeling, a time and place. But,” Max rubs the back of her neck, “I guess you can kind of say that about every type of photography when you really think about it, so. I don’t know, I think there’s a lot of overlap.”

“I think you’re avoiding the answer.”

“Hey,” Chloe says. She puts the drumsticks down on top of the floor tom, and gets up, rocking on her heels to start spending some of her nervous energy before it blows a hole through the top of her skull. “It’s alright, she doesn’t have to say if she doesn’t want to –”

“I was scared of it for a long time,” Max says. She gets behind her tripod again, obscuring her face with the camera so that, when she speaks, they have to make eye contact with the shining black lens. “Someone really hurt me, once. It’s… hard for me to talk about, but I always felt like I could trust a photo, and then I couldn’t anymore. Every time I went to take someone’s picture, I felt like I was standing in his place. Behind the camera, composing a moment of desperation. Taking what I want from the subject and leaving them emptied out. Used up. But, when it came to abandoned places, it felt… safer. No people, not anymore, just what’s left behind.”

"And that’s different now?”

“No.” Max rises from behind the camera, but she still doesn’t look at them when she speaks, adjusting the lens here and there to her liking. “But I’ve been trying really hard to change, and I think maybe I need to learn to be more comfortable with being afraid. My photos will affect people, sometimes for the worse. Sometimes I’ll hurt them in ways they’ll never recover from. And that’ll be true whether or not I take a picture of their face. Look up here?”

Max lifts her hand up and a little to the right, and Izzie’s eyes snap up to look at the palm of her hand at just the moment Max clicks the button to take her picture, but Chloe is looking at the whole of Max, hand and camera and all. She’s seen Max behind a camera all her life, and it’s only at that moment that she registers the camera, really. The tripod, between them. She considers the camera and Max, crouching behind it, as one half-organic, half-mechanical thing and she’s surprised by her own sudden repulsion. It fades quickly, and is replaced by shock and guilt that she could feel such a thing about Max of all people, but she thinks she understands Max a little better now. At least the version of Max who doesn’t always feel very human anymore.

It’s weird. How you can know someone your whole life and still learn new things about them. Even things that they don’t like about themselves.

“Perfect,” Max says. “You want to see it? I think I got what I wanted from you.”

Later, when the pictures are all taken and the band is in full swing, Max and her hang out next to the sound engineer’s dinky little set up, so that Max can have a clear line of sight to film and photograph the stage. As though just to impress their documentarian, Drugstore Makeup is in rare form tonight, having shown up early and being ready to start playing no more than five minutes after their original start time, and they are killing it. They’re loud, they’re emotional, they’re eating up the resentment the wine bar crowd is putting their way and sending it right back with exponential growth. They’re making her proud.

Next to the sound engineer, Max and her have a little pocket of pseudo-privacy, where nobody is looking their way, really, and they can lean into each other with a certain amount of public indecency. Max gestures up at her, miming for her to take an earplug out, and Chloe sacrifices hearing protection at the noble altar of having her girlfriend whisper in her ear. She tucks the earplug into her front pocket and leans down so that Max can cup one hand around the shell of her hear and speak directly into it.

“I really like Izzie,” she says, “do you think I made a good impression?”

"Heyyy,” Chloe says.

“You’re the most jealous girl alive, you know that? I mean, do you think I came off as like – was I being a normal person? Was I being weird?”

Chloe says, “Max.”

“Yeah, okay, I know. Stupid question. I just don’t want your friends to think I’m, I don’t know. Like a corporate drone or an artsy creep or something, I just want them to think I’m a person.”

“Max,” she says. “You are a person.”

“I know. It just doesn’t always feel like it anymore.”

She doesn’t really know what Max meant when she said that her powers sometimes made her feel inhuman. She gets it in theory, in the same way she could see Max behind the camera and understand why she avoided portrait photography for so long, but Max is so – she’s so open and bleeding, she’s a living exposed nerve. It doesn’t really feel like you can be more human than Max Caulfield is, regardless of the time powers. Doesn’t it mean something for someone to be able to run through the same interaction over and over and still feel it, as loud and painful as it was the first time? Chloe isn’t really the arbiter of what makes someone human or not, but it seems pretty human to her.

“Was I,” she says, then starts over and says it louder, to be heard over the music/ “Did I make it worse for you? Back in the day, did I ever make you feel less than a person?”

“No, no,” Max reassures, still speaking directly into her ear. “No, you never – no.”

“I know you never rewound our arguments,” she says, not for the first time. “I shouldn’t have kept bringing it up, I know it hurt you to hear.”

“Chloe, no. That wasn’t it. That was never it.”

“Then what was it?”

Max is quiet for a long time. She takes her hand away from Chloe’s face, and man, if Chloe could live with Max’s hand pressed to her for the rest of her life without it being an impediment to both of them, sign her up. Any time she takes her hand away, it feels like the floor isn’t where Chloe last saw it.

Max thinks with her hands. She touches her camera, adjusts the angle to a miniscule extent. She shifts her ring up and down her finger before settling it back in place. Runs a hand through her hair to push it out of her face, then sighs, coming to the end of the thought, and going back to Chloe’s ear.

“All those people died, and I was happy with you. The science building burned to the ground, and I’m here, listening to your band play, and I’m happy. That’s not very human.”

She says, “Max. That’s maybe the most human thing I’ve ever heard. Come here.”

Max leans in, and Chloe wraps an arm around her, pressing closer together until Max’s head fits under Chloe’s chin and they’re both facing the stage, standing in partial overlap like an annular eclipse. For a moment, Chloe finds herself almost lapsing into the Overlight again, or maybe whatever space is there now that she’s made such an effort to not touch it anymore. She can feel herself drifting away into that awful twilight, somewhere between alive and dead and past and present, even here in this busy place, with all the people around her, with the thrum of loud music in her head and Max pressed so close. Even now she can feel it, just under the surface. The whirling gyre under it all.

Briefly, she thinks of Safi. She hopes that, whatever she’s doing now, she’s happier. Then, she focuses back on the moment.

Chloe can’t imagine Max can hear her, not with earplugs in and speaking at volume below screaming, but she says, “We’re going to make it this time. I promise.” Frankly, she needs the reminder, too.

. . .

Despite the fact that Chloe is the one standing closer to the door, and the fact that she’s Joyce’s one and only daughter in this life, her mom says, “Max!” on opening the door to greet them, reaching for her with her arms spread out wide.

“Hi, Joyce,” Max says. She’s quickly enveloped in a tight hug, such that the next thing she says comes out muffled. “How have you been?”

“Good now that you two are here. Let me look at you, now.” Joyce pulls back to carefully examine Max’s face, her hands staying on Max’s upper arms to hold her steady for inspection. “My! You’ve filled out into a beautiful woman, haven’t you? They’re taking care of you in New England?”

“Mom,” Chloe says. “Don’t call my girlfriend a thick bitch.”

Her mom shoots her an acerbic look that Chloe could recreate from memory, she swears. One set of memories has her wanting to roll her eyes at it, while another wants to break down crying at seeing it, wants to lay down weeping right here on the doorstep of her childhood home, that she last saw from the driver’s seat of a truck, the windows all broken and the roof caved in.

“Chloe,” her mom says. “Come here, come give your poor mother a hug.”

It’d only been a few months since she last hugged her mom. It’d been over a decade since she last saw her mom alive. Chloe pushes her face into her mom’s shoulder, has to bend down to do it, and lets a tension she’s been silently, unknowingly holding since 2013 uncoil. “Hi, Mom. How have you been?”

“Wonderful, honey,” Joyce says. It’s brief, but Chloe can feel her mom pressing her face to her hair and breathing in. “I’ve never been better in my life, having both of my girls back home with me. Now come in, I’ve got brunch on for us, I thought you’d like it better here than at the Two Whales. That’s what y’all like, right? Brunch?”

Chloe, who has had this conversation before many times in at least one timeline, says, “Yes, Mom. Gay people like brunch.”

Max, who’s stayed tactfully quiet since the “filled out” thing, offers a tight but warm smile, and follows Chloe’s mom inside without voicing any one of the many comments she almost certainly has running through her head right now.

The table is set for three – Chloe’s on better terms with David these days, but a divorce is still a divorce – and the kitchen smells like her mom’s pancakes, the kind fried in the unholy concoction that is Crisco and all the better for it. It’s that smell alone that has Chloe stopping in her tracks before she can set foot inside it, freezing in the hallway behind Max and her mother, her mouth dry and her eyes suddenly burning behind her eyelids. 

Both her mom and Max identify her reaction before Chloe herself has any fucking clue what it is. Relief? Nostalgia? An abbreviated descent into overwhelming loss and regret? Anger? It’s all in there, sloshing around like fluids in a bloated corpse. She feels like she might throw up.

“Joyce,” Max says. “Why don’t I take our bags upstairs while you two set the table? I always forget where you keep the forks anyway.”

“Thank you, Max, that would be fine. Chloe?”

“Uh,” Chloe says. Her voice comes out all cracked and cottony. It feels like she hasn’t said anything in years. Eleven of them, at least. “Um. Can we…?” she hooks her thumb back towards the living room. It’s not like there won’t be a tidal wave of feelings there, too, but she’d do anything to create some distance right now, go to neutral grounds.

“Sure, sweetheart,” her mom says. She takes her by the elbow, like Chloe is still four years old and needs help finding the door without tripping over her feet, and Chloe lets herself be guided, half-insane and half-numb, to the couch.

They sit there, facing each other, without saying anything. Chloe honestly would prefer to be yelled at, like Joyce has so many times before, but this. She has no idea what to do with this.

“Chloe,” her mom says eventually. “I know we haven’t always seen eye to eye, you and me.”

Chloe snorts. “Yeah, that’s one way to put it.”

“But… well, shit, Chloe.”

Her mom doesn’t swear very often, so that alone is enough to make her laugh. “That so?”

“I guess what I mean to say is that I wasn’t always the best mother to you. And it might not count for much these days, but I am sorry. You might not believe me right now, but I am, and I hope you know it.”

She takes a strangled breath through clogged lungs. “I wasn’t always the best daughter to you, either.”

“No, you weren’t,” her mom admits. “But it also wasn’t your responsibility to be one. You were wild, and you wouldn’t listen – but I’m grown enough now to admit that I didn’t listen to you, either. And I ought to say it now, in case I never get the chance to, but I’m glad I got to have you as a daughter, Chloe. I wouldn’t have traded you for any other child in the world, even if you drove me up a wall half the time.”

The next breath comes out as a laugh, wetter than a tropical storm. “I’m glad I got to have you as a mom.”

When their eyes meet, Chloe thinks that they’re both in that space together, the halfway void she went with Safi, the place where they are both alive and both dead in the same moment. The place where she never got to say goodbye to her mom, the place where her mom had to bury her in the family plot, next to Dad. They don’t go anywhere, there’s no fog, there’s no multicolored skies or humming lighthouse, but they’re there, without acknowledging it.

Joyce lifts a hand and wipes it under an eye. There aren’t any falling tears there that Chloe can see, but her eyes are shining, and her hand comes away wet. “It’s good that you and Max figured it out, you know. I’ve been saying for years now that you should’ve married that girl.”

“Mom, since when has you telling me to do anything made me more likely to do it?”

She laughs, and it sounds a lot like Chloe’s own laugh. Maybe they’ve always been a bit too much alike. Maybe they’ve always been too different from one another to really understand anything. Her mom taps her on the knee, and she says, “You’ve made a good life for yourself, Chloe Price. It isn’t the life I would’ve chosen for you, but it’s better that it isn’t. I haven’t done all that much to deserve having a place in it, but thank you for keeping a sad old woman around this long.”

“Mom,” Chloe starts, but she doesn’t have anything to continue the thought with. 

She’s still pretty sure that her mom would never say all this stuff if David was still around, but David isn’t still around, and even he is a very different person than he was when she was sixteen, or when she was nineteen, or when she died. The three of them, they’re never going to be alright, not really. It’s always going to hurt, the way thinking about the space in her life Rachel left behind hurts, or the space left when her dad died, but those pains have had a long time to age, and while they’ll never fully heal, she can touch the hurt now without her fingers coming away wet. Maybe that’ll be like that with her mom, one day. Maybe they’ve both learned what a world without each other would be like, and even if that won’t make them all hunky-dory, it’s a start. They can work their way up to it.

Chloe lifts the collar of her shirt and uses it to smear her eyeliner, dabbing the fabric under each eye and sniffing hard. “Max is probably elbow-deep in your medicine cabinet right now,” she says, sounding stuffier than a packed flight, “I should go up and stop her while I still can.”

“Go on, get that girl,” her mom says. “I’ll be down here when you’re ready.”

Sleeping in your childhood bedroom is weird enough to do by herself, but it is super weird to do with your girlfriend of many years. Or your girlfriend of several months, if you’re counting it that way, but really, Chloe isn’t. Max is a girlfriend of many years, and that’s fucking that. They’re far from sleeping yet, lying in the bed that felt far too spacious when they were kids and now seems way too narrow for the both of them, even when they’re folded together like unread mail. Max has her head lying on Chloe’s stomach, resting her eyes without sleeping. She had another headache around dinner time, and it took a lot out of her. Chloe runs a hand through her hair, ostensibly as a scalp massage, but really just because it’s soft and nice to play with.

“Hey,” she says. It’s still too early to sleep, and a thought burns its way through her like an acid. “I have something for you.”

“It’s not my birthday,” Max says. “And it isn’t Christmas. So.”

“It’s not a present. I want to give you something back.”

Max opens one eye, the other shadowed by Chloe’s hand. “This isn’t an “everything you own in a box to the left” thing, right?”

“No, no, it’s just a dumb thing. I’m kind of shocked you didn’t find it when you were snooping earlier. Scooch, I’ll go get it.”

Max wriggles off of her and sprawls out on the bed while Chloe goes to her closet. She pushes the doors open and starts hauling old summer clothes aside, since she left it and every other artifact from the breakup stuffed under so much shit that she wouldn’t be tempted to take a walk down memory lane every time she visited her mom. But it’s still right where she left it, under a box full of relics: Max’s prescription bottle of long-since-expired sleeping pills that she found in her bag in Tennessee and couldn’t bear to throw out; a couple of cherished Polaroids that she wouldn’t burn if you held a gun to her head; a ticket stub from their first real date, when they were finally in a place where they could think about dating, after the storm. She’s aware now that some of these things don’t make sense anymore – they went to the cheapest concert they were able to find in Washington on the night of November 23rd. She remembers being so scared and so sad and holding Max’s hand as the band played and feeling, just for a sliver of a moment, like the luckiest girl alive. The ticket stub says as much, November 23rd, but Chloe also knows for a fact that they hadn’t left Arcadia Bay until after Christmas. The ticket stub shouldn’t exist, but it does. She takes comfort in not being the only one that’s true of.

And under the box, she finds it, Max’s old guitar. It’s seen better days, having been stuffed into a closet for the better part of three years, but it’s here, in one piece. Chloe picks it up, cradling it in both hands the way you hold a faded memory.

Max sits up on the bed. Her eyes have gone fully clear, you can see right through the grey to the other side of the universe. “Is that…?”

“You said that it was destroyed in the storm, for you. That makes sense, I can remember that the dorms were leveled wholesale, but I also remember that, uh, the way it happened to me. The way it happened to some of me, we took it with us when we left, and I brought it back here after we broke up.”

“Chloe,” Max says. The way her voice sounds, Chloe can tell her heart is in her throat. “Why didn’t you just toss it? It’s a pretty cheap guitar.”

“Yeah, but you loved it. I couldn’t just get rid of it. So… here. You can have it back.”

Max does take it back. She stays on the bed after Chloe passes it to her, holding it in her lap without any recognition, like it’s a foreign language, like it’s a place she doesn’t know anymore. But she does take it back.

“Thank you.”

Chloe shrugs a shoulder. She feels like a nineteen-year-old kid, alone in her bedroom with the girl who came by miracle back into her life who she’s scared to kiss without making a game of it. Her palms sweat and tingle, and she dries them on her pajama pants. “It’s yours,” she says. “You don’t have to say thanks.”

“Still,” Max insists. “It means more than I can say. This – it’s real. I still can’t believe that any of this is real, that everyone is alive again, that we’re both here and that – I –” she shakes her head. “But I have this now. And if I can have this, it must be real, right? It has to be.”

She still sounds like she’s convincing herself.

For lack of a better thing to do, Chloe returns to the closet. There’s some other treasures here, not just the box of memories she gets out and puts down next to the bed to review later. She finds her old snowglobe, still intact, and she salvages a surviving thread of Rachel’s friendship bracelet. One day, one day that is coming sooner than she’d like to admit, Rachel Amber will have been dead longer than she’d ever been alive. Chloe is a lucky girl, because she’ll have Max with her when the day comes. 

She also finds a couple of her old journals, because Max isn’t the only one who keeps hers around. She picks one up, and knows which one it is before she cracks it open to the first crinkly page.

“You should probably have this too,” she says without looking over her shoulder. “I wrote these for you.”

Max puts the guitar aside and gets up to meet her in the corner of the room. The two of them stand together as if they were agents in the thick of a conspiracy, or maybe like kids about to kiss. She holds her hands out, and Chloe passes the journal over, open to the first letter.

“They’re not really for you to read. I mean, I didn’t write them thinking you’d ever read them. You still don’t have to, but… I wrote them to you, when you were gone, and I wanted to talk to you.”

“After I went to Seattle?”

“Yeah,” Chloe says. Her mouth is so dry that she can hear every swallow like a gunshot. “I saw a little bit of your journal, uh. The angry pages.”

“Oh.”

“Sorry.”

“No, it’s alright,” Max says. “I don’t… there’s no part of me that you don’t have every right to know, Chloe. I just made those when I was in a very dark place.”

Chloe figures she can get that. She wrote those letters in a pretty dark place, too, mourning her father and feeling like nobody in the world liked Chloe Price very much, and like maybe she didn’t like Chloe Price very much, either. She nods,  “I get it. But hey, quid pro quo, right? You can read my shit, now that I’ve read yours.”

Max looks at the open journal page, and she goes back to the bed. Chloe follows her, and they both sit facing each other, legs crossed. Chloe flicks a light on so that Max can read easier, and she starts to turn the pages. Her face moves along with the words, her mouth opening as if to respond to what she finds there, her forehead creasing with concern. Sometimes, she stifles a laugh, or lifts her gaze up to look at Chloe apologetically, but she reads all twenty-eight letters without stopping.

Well, no. She stops once.

“Chloe Price.”

“What did I do?”

“You wrote me a letter about jerking off?”

“I was sixteen!”

“Barely!”

“I was barely sixteen and I didn’t think you’d ever actually read it!”

But for the most part she stays quiet until the very end. Then, she closes the journal and passes it back. She says, in a neutral but honest tone, “Thank you for letting me see this, Chloe.”

“That’s all you have to say about it?”

She shrugs. “You were angry, and sad, and you needed me when I wasn’t there. I guess I should be grateful that you were even thinking about me at all given everything.”

“I wasn’t,” Chloe says. “No, that’s a lie. I was thinking of you, but not you you. I didn’t think about what you were up to, what you might have going on, just thinking about how you weren’t there for me.”

A corner of Max’s mouth lifts. She brings her hand across the journal between them to cover one of Chloe’s, stroking her thumb across the back of her wrist. “Still. I’m happy you shared it with me.”

But there’s something hanging between them, gone unsaid. Something that has been going stale for years.

“Max,” she says.

“Yeah?”

“You never told me about the Dark Room. Not really.”

Max says, “I told you about it.”

“No, you told me what happened. You never told me about what it was like.”

Her face falls, and she closes her eyes. “That’s another dark place I didn’t want you to go down, Chloe.”

“You went there. I want to go there, too. We’re Max and Chloe, right? We go together.”

She can tell Max doesn’t want to talk about it. She’s spent a decade putting up the kinds of walls around it that you can’t just secret a person through because they asked nicely. But she breathes in deep, and she lets it go with a shudder, and she walks Chloe through it.

She starts at the junkyard, with a bullet through Chloe’s head. Chloe knows this part, just like she knows the needle in Max’s neck, and she knows the Dark Room. That is to say, she knows it in theory, but this is different. Max tells her about how it was to be there. The pop of the gun, almost too loud to hear, and the confusion and helplessness of lying on the ground, too addled to rewind, too scared to move. The feeling that she had failed, again and again, to keep Chloe safe. She tells her about waking up in a sterile room, strapped to a chair, her hands numb from being restrained for so long. She tells her about what it felt like to fall into a picture Jefferson took of her, how she hated to see her own face, dull and helpless and afraid, lying on her side, her wrists tied in front of her. She tells her about knowing that, if she didn’t do something, anything, she’d die there.

She tells her about Jefferson. About having her limbs manipulated and being too numb and afraid to do much more than squirm, about how he’d yell any time she’d flinch. She tells her about talking to him, about talking back, as much as she was able to, about wanting to go out spitting and biting.

“I told him to eat shit and die,” she says, and Chloe can tell she’s still proud of herself, even after so much has come to pass in the intervening years.

“Atta girl.”

As Max walks her through it, some parts with more difficulty than others – the red binders, what Jefferson told her about Rachel, trying to do the whole week over again and realizing, with dawning horror, that she would have to go back to the Dark Room to fix things – they migrate from sitting on the bed to lying down on their sides, facing one another. The rest of it are things Chloe already knows, that David was the one who came to help, that she walked through the storm to be able to turn back the clock to the moment before the Vortex Party. There are things Chloe remembers here, too, that Max doesn’t. The foggy night, gone unremembered, with a version of Max half-conscious of the events unwinding around her, the uncertainty of what would happen to this Max when the Max of the future clicked back into place.

“It felt like I was watching you wake up from surgery,” she says, “or die, or… I don’t know. Even if you’re right, and it’s always the same us, and everything just changes around us to put us where we are, even if we’re constants.”

“It’s scary,” Max says. “To watch someone change.”

Chloe nods.

They lay without speaking for a while after. It’s late enough to sleep now, but she doesn’t want to, feeling her eyes burn from looking at Max without blinking for too long. Max wipes at her eyes, rubbing her eyelids and her temples, but her face is dry.

“I should’ve told you about it a long time ago,” she says. “I didn’t… the time was never right.”

“I wish you had. I always felt like you couldn’t trust me with it, like you were scared or how I’d react to hearing it. Like you thought I was too much of a fuck up to handle it.”

“Chloe, no,” Max insists. She moves her hand across the space so that it lays on top of Chloe’s. Doesn’t this feel just like being back in the past, reeking of chlorine and lying with damp hair in the same bed, in the same room, sharing the same breath. “There’s no-one in the world I trust more than you. “ She shakes her head. “When it was still fresh, it was— I had such a hard time thinking about it, much less saying it out loud. And you were mourning Rachel, and your mom, and the town was destroyed and all those people died. Everything that happened— there, to me, everything that he did to me— seemed so small by comparison, and I just couldn’t… I couldn’t get it out. And then so much time had passed, and we were happy, and I didn’t want to bring the past back up and ruin it, or bring it up during an argument to manipulate you. And then you left, and I was the only one who—“

“Max,” Chloe says. “I never, ever want you to feel like my pain and my trauma and my bullshit is so big that there’s no room for yours.”

“But it didn’t even happen. Not really.”

“Max. It did happen. It happened to you.”

Neither of them say anything. Chloe pulls Max’s hand closer and presses a kiss to the back of her knuckles.

“It happened,” Max says. “The Dark Room, the storm. It happened.”

“It happened.”

“The years we spent together, they were real.”

“They were real.”

“And this is… this is real too, right? We’re in Arcadia Bay? We’re alive, and we’re together, and we’re here?”

“We are.”

“Alright,” Max says. She licks her cracked lips. Chloe knows this expression, she knows that Max is trying hard to believe her. “We are.”

They don’t speak any more after that. After some time, Max’s eyes fall shut, and her breathing evens out, but Chloe keeps her burning eyes open, until they can adjust in the dark to see Max’s face without any light in the room. She closes one eye: the night is all red, and her and Max are here. She closes the other eye: all blue, and they’re still here. She closes both eyes, and tries to get some rest.

. . .

Max holds the photo at the very edge of it, her other hand flicking the lighter until a thin yellow flame sparks up at the tip.

“And you’re sure about this?” Chloe asks. “Really, really sure? It’s okay if you back out now, I won’t call you a pussy.”

“Not an insult. You love pussy.”

“I do.”

“And yes, I am.” The flame licks the frame of the photo, causing the white border to liquify, curdling and blackening in bubbles. “I think I should’ve done this as soon as you gave it to me.”

She holds the Polaroid aloft until it reaches the paper of the photograph, then drops it into the metal drum. It’s a good thing that American Rust is still around and just as abandoned as its always been, otherwise they would have to find somewhere else that’s both meaningful enough to do this at and unlikely to lead to a rampant forest fire.

Max pockets the lighter and then quickly pulls the collar of her shirt up and over her nose and mouth. “Okay, we should leave now, before it burns any more than this.”

“You’re not going to make sure it burns all the way?”

“What?” Max turns to her, looking baffled. “Chloe, it’s a Polaroid picture. It’s made of – plastic, and dyes, and silver bromide. We can’t breathe this stuff, we’ll pass out.”

Chloe considers her original plans for the Polaroid. Namely, burning it in a closed room with shitty ventilation over a trash can. “Yeah, okay, let’s get out of here before that catches any more than it has.”

They beat a hasty retreat before doing any more lasting damage to their lungs, and only come back before the concert, some hours later, once the fumes have fully cleared out, just to ease Max’s nerves. The fire is well and truly dead at that point, so bringing the fire extinguisher was kind of overkill, but Chloe isn’t going to blame the girl for being overly cautious at that point.

From American Rust, they hang a right until they get to where the old mill used to be. It’s one of those places that didn’t survive any version of the storm, it was too old and shitty to last, RIP in peace to it. In its place, the Chases (Victoria, probably) actually put up a real concert venue, and it isn’t even a very small one, either, it’s like a proper place and everything. It has fire exits! It’s a little sad to see the place where Firewalk reigned turned into a nice, shiny concert venue with seats and shit, but you can’t live in the past forever.

The band is late, naturally. They meet them backstage, just outside of the green room, Bash roughhousing with Izzie over a bag of chips.

Chloe prepares herself for a managerial migraine. “You know that there’s snacks inside the greenroom, right, girls?”

“Not good ones! It’s all vegan seaweed chips and seed butters and shit in this part of the country.”

Max pipes in, “Not every part. You could’ve grabbed burgers at the Two Whales if you hadn’t run late.”

“Iz needed to stop to try and pet a deer.”

“It was a black-tailed deer! They’re such little guys, I had to say hi.”

“For forty-five minutes? With apple slices?”

Izzie does not look remorseful in the slightest.

Bash sniffs dismissively, but she hands over the bag of chips, then folds her arms across her chest to make her muscles stand out. She’s wearing a tank top. It’s late fall. “Chloe, this place is kind of Podunk for us.”

“Whatever, Bash. You’re from Ridgefield.”

“I’m from Hoboken!” She insists, in vain. Chloe knows where her ass crawled from. “They took one look at me coming in and they asked if I wanted a pronoun badge. Fuckers.”

“Well, why don’t you she/they set up your drums properly before I have to do it myself and make sure they do it wrong on purpose?”

“Fuck off!”

But they do set up the drums the way Bash has to have them, and they get Izzie’s pillow princess of a guitar hooked up and ready to rock in time, and Chloe made sure to tell the girls that the show was going to stop thirty minutes earlier than it actually was (Max’s idea), so they actually end up being up and not crying only five minutes past the hour. For them, that’s basically early.

“And you’re sure you don’t need any help?” Max asks, setting up her tripod at the corner of the stage, close enough to get good footage, but far enough to the left that the audience can’t see her. “I can play a mean cowbell.”

“We’re axing the cowbell,” Chloe says. “I can’t be seen. Or you, for that matter. The crowd can’t know that I’m affiliated in any way with this band.”

Max quirks an eyebrow. “Why?”

“See that guy back there, with the nasallang piercing and the purple hair? He’s hanging out near the merch table, look at that ornery son of a bitch.”

“I see him.”

“That’s the guy who did my sleeve. Small town punk scene, of course he’s still in town for this. He basically did it half-free out of goodwill and a shit ton of favors, if he sees that I blacked it out, he’ll make the Station nightclub look like a charity concert.”

Izzie brings the mic to her lips and puffs air against it. “One, two; one two. Smoke on the water, oh good, it works!”

From where she is, standing in the unseen corner of the stage, Chloe claps a hand to her opposite arm, just above the elbow, and shows her middle finger at both dearly beloved members of her band.

They stay hidden from view for the duration of the show, which isn’t Chloe’s favorite place to be. She’d like to be out there in the mosh pit, jamming out, getting loose, and having Max do the same, but this, sitting on an unused amp that’s only barely big enough for the two of them, making a game of trying to push the other off without their hands between Max checking her shots.

“You know,” she says, when there’s a brief break between songs. “I have enough footage to cut together a documentary, basically.”

“Really? Do you think anyone would like to see that?”

Max shrugs. “I’m not a filmmaker. And you know me, it’ll probably be all lingering shots and introspection. Not a huge draw for the emo dance artcore scene.”

“Eh, you’ll make it look cool and artsy. You can do anything, superstar.”

“Could be a fun project,” Max concedes.

“Could be!”

The next song starts up. It’s “Brand New”, which is about bottom surgery, but it’s slower than the previous song, and less conducive to playing king of the amp. Instead, Chloe leans into Max, tipping her head against her shoulder, and Max wraps an arm around her hip, and they linger. She hopes this lasts for a really, really long time. Forever, even.

After another couple of songs, Max mimes for her to take out an earplug. 

Chloe obliges, lifting her head and taking out a wedge of pink rubber and leaning in so that Max can say whatever she wants into her ear. She’s expecting another important talk, but is instead met with Max’s warm lips parting around her earlobe, her front teeth closing around one of Chloe’s earrings and giving it a light tug. She follows it up by dragging the pointed tip of her tongue along the shell of Chloe’s ear, all the way up to the helix earring, which she circles, sucking and biting until it’s close to painful. Chloe’s always liked it damn near painful.

Right on the cusp of unbearable, Max trails back down and rests her lips just under Chloe’s ear, kissing it almost chastely. Sucking the spot there once, just to make Chloe shiver and whine, then pulling away with a wet sound.

Chloe makes a sound that wants very badly to be words, but isn’t. She clears her throat. “What was that for?”

“No reason.” Max gives her a merciless little smirk. “I guess I like you or something.”

She shakes her head. “Still such a horndog, Caulfield. You know, the girls have this one on lock, I think. They could probably handle the rest of the show without us.”

“And I already have so much footage.”

“Right, I was just thinking that you already have so much footage. They probably wouldn’t even notice that we’re gone.”

In the parking lot, it’s a moonless night, and everyone else is inside. The noise from the venue filters through the walls and out into the protracted field of cars, all lined up crookedly on the half-assed pavement, all gravel and dirt and dried up cigarette butts. The sound reaches them as a hum, as a vibration, more than anything the ears can pick up, and it finds them pressed together in the back of Chloe’s van, late autumn coats and hats thrown off into the footwell, their mouths on each other, their hands on each other. The nights are getting longer, and life is getting longer and longer, longer than you’d ever hope to dream, and Max is saying into her mouth, “Harder, baby. Oh, God. Oh, that, yes, like that.”

The next thing she says, Chloe swallows, so she feels it more than she hears it. It isn’t words, but she understands it. It means I love you, and I love you, and I love you. Forever, and after that, too.

. . .

They don’t make it very far out of Arcadia Bay, really, just a little past the sign before Max says, “Chloe?”

She doesn’t say, “Chloe, pull over.” Or call out, “Chloe!” in a panicked tone, she just says her name like it’s a question, like she needs help. Whatever it is, it’s urgent enough that she doesn’t follow it up with anything else, and when Chloe takes her eyes off of the road to look at Max, she has her head tucked between her knees like she’s trying not to be sick.

“Shit.” Chloe yanks at the steering wheel to pull into the nearest barren shoulder she can find to fit the huge ass car, and just about careens to a stop.

Max doesn’t react to the sudden stop. She keeps her head between her legs, and starts gulping these fast, starving mouthfuls of air, like she just surfaced from deep water. She’s trembling all over, not very hard, but without stopping. It reminds Chloe of nothing so much as the days after the storm, huddling together in a motel room, clutching desperately to each other and shaking, shaking, shaking.

Chloe snaps her seatbelt off and lunges across the console, putting a hand on the back of Max’s neck, moves it to the small of her back, to her shoulders, to the small of her back again. No matter where her hand lands, it gets her no response. “Max, Max, Max,” she chants. “Max, what’s wrong? Talk to me. C’mon, look at me, what’s happening?”

For a very frightening second, the oldest and most insecure parts of Chloe’s mind take over, and they say that Max is regretting burning the photograph, is regretting coming here with her, is regretting all of it, that she doesn’t love her, that she wants out. She swallows around them and rubs Max’s back in frantic circles until Max stops shaking quite so badly.

“I don’t,” Max says, hoarsely. “I don’t know, I can’t –”

“Max,” she says, keeping her voice low and even, “you’re having a panic attack, I’m pretty sure. Can you try to slow your breathing?

She does try. Chloe watches as Max wobbles up in her seat, getting her head back up, and breathes in through her nose and out through her mouth in a very poor attempt at box breaths, and for a moment, it holds. No shaking, no panting. And then, just as quickly, the house of cards collapses under its own weight, and Max starts crying into her hands.

It’s a proper cry this time, the real fucking thing, not just two little tear tracks or dry heaving, she goes to pieces. She presses the heels of her hands into her eyes, hard, and saltwater runs from under her fingers, from under her palms. Her teeth creek from how hard she grinds them together, her breathing gone choppy and hiccuping around her sobs. She cries like Chloe hasn’t seen her cry before, like her heart is breaking.

It isn’t enough to have a hand on her back, or two hands for that matter. Chloe briefly checks the road to see no cars are barreling their way, then pushes the driver’s side door open to slip out of the van. She walks around the front of it to the other side, then yanks at the door handle to let in some of that fresh Oregon air. She lets Max breathe freely for a moment, then reaches into the car and gathers her up in her arms, leaning into her so that Max can fit her face into Chloe’s shoulder, her hands trapped between them, and she rocks them back and forth in place.

And she cries a bit, too. She can’t not, with her girl this upset. Max shudders with the force of each sob, like it’s clawing its way out of her, and Chloe sniffles into the nape of her neck, terrified and helpless to do anything but hold on.

It takes some time. Ten minutes, maybe, maybe longer, but eventually, Max starts to cry a little less painfully. She’s still crying, but she doesn’t sound like she’s gasping for air anymore, just sad. Just very sad. Gently, she nudges away from Chloe, and Chloe sets her back down in her seat, lingering outside of the car.

“Sorry,” Max says. Her voice is so scratchy and stuffed up that there’s barely any inflection on the word, it’s mostly mouthed. “I saw the sign in the side mirror.”

Chloe doesn’t have to use her internal 3D glasses to remember the last time Max saw the sign in the rear view. Thank you – come again, and a trail of destruction behind them miles long. Signage in the road, houses in the road, bodies in the road. It’s a memory so bright and so hideous that it burns like a brand, living in the place of other people. Why should she get to? The guilt. The guilt.

Max says, “I don’t know. I just felt like – I thought I would turn around and it would be gone again. I thought… I know it was real, I know, but I thought that, if I saw it in the mirror, if I looked back, it would be gone again. I can’t explain it, but I thought I shouldn’t look at it, and then I did, and –”

She wheezes around the end of the thought.

Chloe squeezes her upper arm. “It’s okay. Max, it’s okay, it’s still there. Everyone is still there, and I’m still here.”

“I guess it just hit me all at once,” Max says. She wipes at her eyes, but fresh tears pour out just as quickly, she can’t dry them fast enough, she can’t even start to keep up. “It’s real. It’s all really here, it’s real. All those people— all those people I killed.”

“All those people who died because you had to make an impossible choice, Max. You didn’t kill them.”

“All those people who died because of me. They’re back. They’re here. And all I can think is how I would do it again. In a heartbeat, Chloe. Your mom, who just made us breakfast an hour ago. Every person, good or bad or in between, and I would do it again if I had to. How could I think that? How could you love someone who thinks that?”

And Chloe looks at her. Really looks at her. Not just the Max who saves anyone and everyone she can and then tries to save even those she can’t and succeeds. Not just her, but also the Max who is scared. The Max who is hurting. The Max who is avoidant and flaky and selfish. The Max who can be cruel and cold and calculating. Even the Max she isn’t right now, but the person she might become some day, the Max of years to come, who will age and change and maybe fall out of love with her. She looks at the whole picture, and she knows, doesn’t just think or feel but know, that, if given the same impossible choice, she would do the same. That if it was the life of Max Caulfield and a whole town full of innocents, a whole town of them and her mother among them, she’d close her eyes and wipe it off the map like a dream you forget as soon as you wake up. She would. She really would.

She says, “I know you probably aren’t going to believe me right now, but it’s actually very easy.”

And despite everything, Max laughs. It’s not a good laugh, it’s wet and her throat is raw and she’s still crying into her hands, but it’s a start.

From then on, it’s just a matter of doing everything step by agonizing step. Chloe gets the stupid big bottle of water she has in the cup holder and she bullies Max into drinking a little. Then, she gets the doors of the back of the truck open so that they can sit in the back with their legs dangling down, facing Arcadia Bay in the rear view of their lives, the forest and sea and the thousands of lives spinning quietly between wood and water. Max’s crying slows, then reduces itself into the occasional drip down her face, and then stops completely, and she’s just leaning against Chloe’s shoulder, inhaling and exhaling until it doesn’t sound like it hurts her to breathe anymore.

They stay there for however long they stay there. Who’s counting the minutes, anyway?

“Hey,” Chloe says, a very small and private eternity later. “Kind of a bad time to ask, but you want to get married? Not right now, just –”

Max starts to laugh, which is not the response you love to hear when you ask a girl that, but her eyes are bright and twinkling like a fucking fairy tale. “Are you seriously asking me that right now?”

“I’m not proposing. Just, you know, just gauging interest.”

The laughter gets bigger, less wet, more snorting. “You’re taking a survey?”

“I guess?” Chloe finds herself shifting her weight from foot to foot, standing in front of the girl she loves in the town they somehow didn’t destroy. “Do you want to marry me one day? Circle one: yes, no, maybe.”

“Chloe,” Max says. Her laughter dries up, but there’s still little spots of it all over her face, if you know where to look – around her eyes, at the crinkle of her nose, in a little dimple trying hard to hide itself in her cheek. “Chloe, I don’t need anyone on this planet to tell me that I have to love you forever. I already do. I already have. I already will. You know that.”

“I do,” Chloe says. She puts her hands out, feeling lost. “But do you want to be married? To me?”

Max takes both of her hands in hers. “It would make,” she says, “taxes easier.”

“I knew you were keeping me around for my math skills.”

“Your math skills and your good looks, cut me some slack.”

“I keep telling you, filing as a freelancer is not that hard, you just have to report quarterlies. We’ll make a spreadsheet.”

“Chloe,” Max says. She sniffs one last time, then grows serious, although the twinkle of humor is still there, and Chloe is starting to think it isn’t going away any time soon. “Chloe. Chloe Elizabeth Price.”

“Max “The Hitman” Caulfield.”

“I would marry you,” she says, “anywhere. You could ask me to marry you every day and I would say yes every time. Say the word, and we’ll get back in the front seats, and we’ll drive down to the courthouse, and we’ll be married by sundown.”

“Eh, I don’t think Arcadia Bay paperwork gets processed that quickly.”

“You could ask me to marry you in a grimy dive bar, or a junkyard, or a condemned building.”

“Why,” Chloe asks, “am I only marrying you in shitty places?”

“You could ask me to marry you in the space between realities for all I care. I would say yes, every time. Anywhere I go, I want to be there with you, for the rest of my life. When you do ask me for real, and it better be really cool when you do, so start planning now, I am going to marry the pants off of you.”

“Cool.” Chloe grins so hard that it feels like her mouth is going to take over the rest of her body. “That’s pretty great.”

“Plus, imagine the Joyce brownie points I would get for it. Chloe Price? A kept woman? I’d be her hero for life.”

Chloe laughs. “God, don’t tell her that. And don’t say kept woman, either, it sounds way too spicy for us. We’re old and boring, haven’t you heard?”

Max gets back to leaning against her, but she doesn’t let go of her hand. She twines their fingers together and squeezes Chloe’s hand as tight as a promise. “You really have a sense of timing, don’t you? Why did you ask me now?”

The sky is the kind of blue that means it’ll be very cold tonight, and it’s Arcadia Bay, so it’s only blue in the space between clouds and marine layer fog, but the blue is nice when you can see it. Chloe closes one eye, and she sees all red: the future stretches on and on and on, and she doesn’t have to go it alone. She closes the other eye, and she sees all blue: she’s too old to die young and too stupid to stop caring and the world hurts and hurts and it doesn’t give a shit about her or anyone she loves, but she doesn’t have to go it alone. She opens both eyes. She keeps her eyes open.

“I don’t know, it felt like the right place,” she says. “The right time. I don’t want to spend another day of my life without you in it, what else matters?”

“Not a lot,” Max says.

They lay their heads together, Chloe’s on top of Max’s, Max’s against her shoulder. Even when it feels like it should stop right here, time keeps moving forward.

. . .

Max sits on the floor of the hotel room, and Chloe, lying above her on the bed, calls out, “D, that’s a D string at the end, you’re playing a G. D, D, that’s a Deeeeee. Fuck, you’re awful at this!”

“Screw you,” Max says, then runs through the whole intro again, rushing all the notes together: open G open A, fourth finger on G, D-2 to open G, B-1, D-2 again, and then she fucks it up. “I know how to do this!”

“You don’t have to hammer the G if you can’t, you know. Just play an open B, it’ll sound the same.”

“I’ll hammer your G.” She tries again, and gets past the intro this time until she stumbles over the fingering and draws to a halt. “Shit! Son of a bitch.”

“Such language, Professor Caulfield.”

Max fixes her with such a glare. “I’m changing my mind,” she says, “maybe we shouldn’t get married.”

“Nooo! Come on, just start with an easier song. Play something easier.”

It doesn’t look like Max is going to play anything easier, based on her determined expression, but she does move the capo to the second fret, then starts to strum with a fervor. She plays an Em7, a G, a D, and then an A7sus4, and sings, “Today is gonna be the day that they’re gonna throw it back to you –” although she doesn’t get any further than that before Chloe chucks the overly-soft top pillow that hotels always have on beds for some reason right at her face.

“Boo! Boo, play something from the heart! You made a bad joke instead of being honest!”

“I have no regrets,” Max says, having freed herself from the pillow. She lobs it back at Chloe halfheartedly, then repositions the guitar in her lap. “You’re so lucky I didn’t break her, she’s so old and frail.”

“I’ll be old and frail by the time you pick a song and stick with it.”

“Jeez, tough crowd.”

The next attempt is familiar, but subdued. She fusses with the capo some more, gets her hands in the right position, then plays a G, a G, a C, and another C. “When everything is lonely I can be my own best friend, I get a coffee and the paper, have my own conversations.”

It’s more honest, certainly, but it’s also a little painful, still, to press on the memory. Not unkindly, she asks, “Max, don’t you know any new music?”

“I haven’t played guitar in eleven years, Chlo, I can only just barely remember how to play what I was listening to then, and even that’s pretty fuzzy.”

“Clearly. Just play something by ear and rewind if you get it wrong.”

Max snorts. “As if you wouldn’t call me out for it? You would figure me out instantly.”

“I would, but still. Play me something new, Max Martin. Play me something happy!”

She doesn’t think Max really knows any happy songs, but she entertains her. She watches as Max adjusts the capo one more time, takes it off completely, then fiddles with the tuning until she’s satisfied. “No judgement if I fuck this up, alright?”

“No promises.”

Fumbling her way through the picking, Max plays a C minor, an E-flat, and an Abmaj7 and stays on that for a while. Once she feels steady on her feet, she starts singing the lyrics, without a lot of confidence behind it. "Dove right into the water, I think you'll be just fine. Can we stay here forever, wasting all of our time?”

Chloe is, for her part, stumped. “I don’t know that one,” she says. “I like it.”

“It’s new, I think,” Max says, then struggles with the next few lines. "Maybe it's far from perfect, maybe I'm losing my mind, and if you feel it's not worth it, I pray to God that you'll lie. Um, I don’t really know how the pre-chorus goes, but I’m supposed to strum for this part.”

“Skip until you know it, I won’t tell anyone.”

It’s clear that she jumps a verse, and the strumming is honestly really rough, but Chloe rests her chin on her folded arms and she contents herself with watching the girl she loves well and truly suck at something, without once turning the dial back on it.

Once Max is a bit more steady on the song again, she half-sings, half-speaks the next few lines, “Maybe I'll stay forever, maybe for one more night, and if it's for the better, I'll stay as long as you'd like. How’s that?”

“Pretty bad,” Chloe admits.

“Hey!”

“You should keep going, you’re getting better.”

“Okay, but if you make fun of me, I’ll leave.”

“No, you won’t.”

“No,” Max sighs. “I won’t.”