“So, Chloe, where do you think we should go first? Head down the coast to Big Sur and Beyond?” She says, quoting what Chloe had said to her in Frank’s RV. “Wherever we go, I think we should leave tomorrow morning. I can’t… handle them anymore.” She loves her parents but she couldn’t take it anymore. She wanted to just be alone with Chloe. They needed to be alone. They needed privacy. And the only privacy they got at her parents was right now, late at night, in her bedroom. It felt strange being in her old Seattle bedroom, because it felt like she hadn’t been here in years, not a few months. She and Chloe were lying facing each other, holding hands.
“Can you believe they tried to offer you the spare room?” She asks like she’s offended, because it is a little funny. Her parents are fucking clueless. “I guess they’ll find out eventually, like after we elope.” Now she’s giving a throw back to the text she will probably never forget Chloe sent her, and the exchange that had sent her heart hammering in class and sends it hammering again just remembering it.
max
the boss with the gun
marry me
illegal in Oregon.
For now.
fuq that shit
elope
But she can’t blame her parents for not noticing the closeness between her and Chloe, the way they never seem to let go of each other’s hands. They were still coming off the terror of thinking she was dead. When she and Chloe had been standing there in that storm, by the lighthouse, hand in hand watching the storm, their storm, after she made her choice, after they promised forever, she hadn’t been thinking about anyone but Chloe and the now. It had been hours later in the early morning she had looked at her phone and saw it had been blown up with missed calls and texts from her terrified mom and dad, pleading and begging her to answer.
She’d only had the strength to fire off a text saying “im okay I’m alive with chloe we’re safe’ which resulted in more calls and texts from her mom and dad, which Max had ignored until only after they’d decided they would stop there, because as much as she and Chloe wanted to keep driving, they needed supplies like food, money (the money they had stolen had mostly gone to Frank, the rest lost in the storm), gas oh and clothes. All they’d had was what they were wearing.
“we’re coming to you’ she’d shot off, nothing more.
And it had been hard. Having her mom and dad be so hysterical, having them talk about the storm, a storm they did not know she had caused and that Chloe’s being alive was the reason it had happened. They did not seem to understand she and Chloe wanted space to just be alone together, practically suffocating them and wanting to check on them every five seconds, it felt like.
They’d filled suitcases for themselves. Max had gotten her parents to sneak her photos hidden away in her attic (the rest she’d taken from her own bedroom) she had taken of her and Chloe as kids and other things from home, her real home, now lost forever. She’d hid it all from Chloe in the bottom of her suitcase, because she wasn’t ready to look at them and knew Chloe wouldn’t be either.
Her parents had given them money - enough to last probably a year if they were careful, enough to be able to sleep at hotels when they wanted, to travel around until they figured things out. Her parents wanted them to stay, to stay as long as they wanted, but Max knew there was no way she and Chloe would want to do that. Just a few days were rough enough here.
“Unless you want to stay here so my mom can ask you if you want anything for another hundred thousand times,” she says it to try and poke more lightness in their pain, though a part of her flinches internally using the word mom. She’s been weirdly careful saying mom and dad around Chloe, maybe because she feels so horrible knowing Chloe has now lost William and Joyce, and then she’s here, not having to lose either of her parents.
We’ll be okay… even if right now… we’re hurting so much. We have each other now. Forever…
