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“Kidnapping? You wouldn’t dare!”
“Don’t you know that the first road trip, up to Seattle was my first attempt?” I joke.
“Yet, you still let me go,” she teases right back.
“That’s a part of my charm.” I wink.
“You’re horrible.”
“Want to adventure today?” I ask.
“You… adventure?” She quirks an eyebrow as if she doesn’t believe me.
“Humor me.”
We leave the diner and I get behind the wheel of her car. I use the address in my email and find parking at the bottom of the hill of the parking lot.
“What are we doing here?” she asks.
We’re walking up the hill to head to the Griffith Observatory, something that I’ve always wanted to do. A location that you see countless times in movies and I’ve wanted to see it for myself.
“I’ve never been here before,” I tell her. “I thought that it would be a fun thing to do. Have you ever been here before?”
“No,” she shakes her head.
I grab her hand and we make our way up towards the top of the hill. We stop at a bench halfway up with a view of the Hollywood sign and we rest on the bench for a minute.
“I never really looked at Los Angeles as being anything other than a concrete jungle. I didn’t think that all of this was really lush in greenery.” I say to her.
“There’s a whole other world here, you just need to know where to go. There’s canyons, there’s trails and it’s not too far for the forest. We have mountains and then we have the beach,” she explains. “Then there’s the other end, the freeways and the roads. That’s what you would call the concrete jungle. But it’s all about finding the level of what you want.”
“And what level of the world, do you normally look for?” I ask.
“A mixture. I don’t do the hiking thing, but I like to get outdoors whenever I can. I work downtown, so I have a lot of concrete in my life on a regular basis.”
“True, but you have the options for all of it, right?”
“I do. Sometimes, work takes me out of the office and to nice venues outside of downtown. But when I’m driving, it’s alright because I get to listen to my podcasts or my music.”
“That doesn’t sound like a bad thing,” I take a deep breath, look up the hill, and then return to her. “Are you ready to get to the top?” I ask her as I stand and offer her my hand.
* * *
We did Los Angeles tourist things while in the city and later that night ordered Chinese food. I’ve gone from the constant working and never having a moment that wasn’t focused around work to lounging around with a girlfriend and eating takeout without looking at or touching my phone. Enjoying my time and not rushing through it.
Sunday night came too fast and I was boarding a red eye plane back home, hoping that this is one of the last times that I would have to.
I go to sleep upon getting home, with the thoughts of how different my future could be, all because of a night that happened in Vegas.
Chapter Seventeen
“This one time in Vegas, I tried to get married, but both 24-hour license offices were closed, telling me to go to the other.“
PEYTON
I knock lightly on my boss’s door the day after my visit with Max ended.
He looks up and smiles immediately which normally puts me at ease, except today, my nerves are sky-high and I’m pretty sure there’s sweat dripping down my spine.
