Tuesday & Max

20

I KNOW EVERYTHING CHANGES

ALL THE CITIES AND FACES

BUT I KNOW HOW I FEEL

ABOUT YOU

The sitting room is directly beneath Diana's room, so Max suggests they go to his, where they can play music and Pixar films in the background louder.

There's an immediate connotation to moving to someone's bedroom; not only is it a personal space, stacked to the ceiling with imprints of their daily monotony, but it's private. There's a bed. It's Netflix-and-Chill territory.

Tuesday tries not to think about it. It's no different to studying in The Bean. Their relationship is still the same.

They slip up the plush-carpeted stairs quietly, past a myriad of closed doors until Max opens and closes his gently behind them, and Tuesday finds herself in his space.

His impeccably tidy space.

The room is quite dim, lit by the classic old stone archway window that lies low in the opposite wall. At first glance, the walls look the same stone as the window, but Tuesday notices it curling around the light switch and realises it's wallpaper. The floor is dark wood, covered with a ragged and fraying blue rug, and there's a neatly made bed, and a desk with a slim TV, and a wardrobe, and everything else usual that comes with a bedroom.

"Did I mention that you're fancy?" Tuesday says, mostly to break the silence and Max's expectant gaze.

"I'm really not," he says, leaving her side to fiddle with the TV. He puts on How to Train Your Dragon. Cute.

She sits on the bed. It's bigger than a single, but not quite big enough to be a double. The duvet is thick, white and just smells clean. Nothing at the flat ever comes out this nicely; Max's bedding smells like 'Clean Laundry' candle smell, cleaner than anything could seemingly ever be in real life.

When he sits beside her, getting out his books, she notices a black speck on the wall behind his head.

Of course. Old houses are prime spider real estate.

"What?"

She glances down and Max's warm brown eyes are on hers.

"Oh, it's nothing," she says, glancing between him and the spider involuntarily. "It's just... there's a spider..."

Max turns, presumably to appraise the danger, then shrugs. "So?"

He's already getting up, though, so she knows he'll get it. The mental image of it fleeing before it gets smushed into the wall makes her shudder.

But Max is inspecting an empty water glass on his bedside table, and when he lifts a magazine about videogames – who buys magazines anymore? – along with it, she realises he intends to catch the little creep.

"You don't have to do that," she says, scooting backwards as he looms toward the spider. "You can just hit it with a shoe."

Max doesn't answer until he's delicately nudged the spider with the inside edge of the glass. It falls onto the clear surface – Tuesday jumps – and wiggles about desperately before finding its feet and retreating further down the glass. Max carefully lifts it away with the magazine and empties it out of the window.

Bye-bye, spider. Don't come back.

"I don't like killing them," Max says, replacing the impromptu extractor items back where he got them. The bed jiggles as he sits back down next to her.

"Why?"

He pauses. Shrugs. "I don't know. There's no need. It's just living its spider life." He's distracted by the TV screen momentarily. "Do you want a drink?"

"Okay."

"Water? Juice?" He's getting up again. Tuesday wonder if his nervous energy ever stops. "Gin?"

The last option is unexpected and it makes her laugh.

"I hate gin."

Max looks back at her, the joke somehow becoming more of a serious option with her passionate rejection of it.

"You don't."

"I do," Tuesday laughs. "Sometimes Julia drinks Gordon's when she's sad."

"Gordon's is terrible," Max says, in the same haughty tone he'd used to damn those who used sugar in their coffee. "My mom has one downstairs that's raspberry flavoured."

An unexpected memory fills her mind. They never had Gordon's when her mother was alive. She drank weird herbal gins, an array of frosted bottles in the corner of the kitchen. When Tuesday tried one, it'd tasted mostly of grass and medicine. Julia and her mother had laughed desperately at her twisted expression.

"You know I'm not even seventeen until May, right?" she says, laughing nervously, unsure if this is a joke or not.

"And I'm not even eighteen until... eight... months away?" he says, visually counting.

"Touché," she says.

Raspberry gin at three-thirty in the afternoon? Why not? Max's mother is asleep. She'll never know. By the wine she'd been drinking herself, she might not even care.

Max returns after ten minutes with two huge round squat glasses. Each one is bobbing with ice and lime slices, the liquid of a faint pinkish hue. They look pretty. Is this what Max drinks? Aren't seventeen-year-old guys supposed to drink beer and Jagerbombs, or something?

Then again, most seventeen-year-old guys probably don't live in fancy-booze-filled castle houses, or have strange mothers that either sleep all the time or... do whatever OCD makes them do.

He hands the glass to her and she takes a tentative sip. It still has a vaguely medicinal taste, but a shock of raspberry masks both that and the biting burn of alcohol enough so it's bearable. It's better than vodka shots from The Doe, at least.

"Do you still hate gin?" Max asks.

"Maybe not this gin," Tuesday says.

He reaches out a hand. "Well, if you're really not sure, I can just throw it away..."

"No!" Tuesday yanks out of his reach, laughing. Pink liquid spills over the rim of the glass and splashes her jeans, a couple of drops dotting his bedcovers. "Shit—oops!"

"Ah, it's okay," he says, rubbing at the dots on the duvet uselessly.

The alcohol warms her as it did in The Doe, but this time, the warmth doesn't go anywhere. It grows, nourished by How to Train Your Dragon, a second gin, and Max's left foot brushing her right foot by accident (probably) as they both drift into a lying-down position next to each other.

The movie credits roll and so does Max, turning on his side to look at her. "We should probably do some studying," he says. Studying is starting to become an abstract term; one that doesn't include an awful lot of reading of college materials, actually, but a lot of coffee and chatter instead.

"Or..." Tuesday sings, turning too, her head tilting toward the duvet. Gin makes her head feel nice. Max makes her head feel nice. They're a good combination.

"Or...?" he mirrors, and they look at each other.

Only, this time, the or doesn't feel like coffee or chatter. This time, the or feels heavy, low in her body. She's aware of every one of her limbs and the proximity they are to his. She can acknowledge, for the first time, unashamedly, that the sight of him has come to make her body pulse. His lips have a taste and she wants to know it.

Kiss me, she wants to say. Kiss me, we're already out of control, I'll deal with everything else later.