Page 23 of Tangled Up In You
A shrieking giggle ripped through the car, and Fitz barely managed to keep from slamming down hard on the brakes. “Holy sh—what! What is going on?”
“There’s a place called Sex Peak about sixty miles down that way!”
He took a beat to gape at her before turning back to the road. “What in the hell is Sex Peak?”
“I don’t know! But it’s on the map!” She turned to him. “Fitz, may I use your browser to google it?”
He sighed, resigned. “Fine. But don’t look at the other tabs.”
She was quiet for a second and then hummed. “Oh,” she said, frowning down at the screen. “That name is misleading. It’s a lookout point and camping area. I don’t see anything about sex happening here.”
“A lookout? Yeah, for sure people have sex there.”
“They do?”
“I mean, I assume so. It’s called Sex Peak.”
“I guess you would know.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She ignored this, whispering in awe, “The internet is magic.”
He quickly glanced to see what she was looking up. “What are you googling?”
“Whether people have sex at Sex Peak.”
“Okay there, Sweden, let’s just…” He reached for the phone and tucked it into the center console. “Maybe let’s take a break from Google. I don’t want you getting carsick.”
“Oh, good point.” She looked out at the slowly darkening view ahead of them for a few minutes and cleared her throat before turning to look at him. She didn’t speak, but he felt the pressure of her attention on the side of his face like a finger gently tapping there.
Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore. “God. What.”
“I wanted to apologize if that was rude just now when I said ‘You would know.’ You might not be a lothario at all, I don’t want to assume.”
“A lothario? Seriously, Ren, where did you learn to speak?”
She ignored this. “When I first arrived, before I met you for the tour? Miriam—that’s my roommate—said you were always in everyone’s pants and warned me not to let you in mine.”
Fitz swore Max’s engine stuttered beneath him, and he gripped the steering wheel tighter. “Rule eleven. No discussion about whose pants anyone’s been in.”
With a nod, she pulled the pencil from the spiral ring of her notebook, turned back the page, and added number eleven to the list of rules.
He sensed a change in Ren the second they reached the border to Idaho. As they passed the sign indicating that they’d crossed the state line, her shoulders hunched up to her ears and she pulled her knees up, hugging herself.
“You all right there, Sweden?”
“Yes.”
He wasn’t so sure. For the entire forty-five minutes through the panhandle, she appeared to be going through an existential crisis. Mumbling quietly to herself, she argued with an invisible voice. He thought he caught an “If they found out, this would kill them!”
Ignoring her, he turned the music up.
Finally, she raised her hand to speak.
He lowered the music again. “Yes?”
And then she dropped a bombshell: “Fitz, can we—can we turn around?”