Page 111 of The Route to You

Kyle groaned, feeling bad about that, even though his guilt was slightly ridiculous. He hadn’t asked Anna to be there tonight, after all, or done anything to encourage her since that ill-advised tongue swapping over eight months earlier.

That didn’t mean he enjoyed watching anyone feel bad.

But watching Sloan shrink further into her seat each time Anna had flirted with him had forced him to make a decision. And that, in the end, had been a surprisingly easy choice.

So . . . what does that mean?

He pushed the covers to his bed aside, then flipped on the light on his nightstand. He felt the need to do something , but he couldn’t decide what it was yet.

Maybe set up a calendar countdown to how many days he’d be putting himself through the torture of living with a woman he was sexually attracted to despite the complicated situation.

He needed to stop ruminating on this.

Sloan couldn’t be the center of his thoughts at all times.

He had plenty of other things he needed to work out, and not just his love life—or lack thereof.

Maybe he needed to come up with a plan for what lines of work might be acceptable, given the fact that he’d turned down a perfectly good and well-paying job offer today from his interview several days earlier.

Which, if my family knew about, they might kill me for doing.

His gaze flicked over to the dresser where he kept Granny’s urn and her final letter. Sloan had given it to him after dinner tonight, and he’d put it there, but it felt weird having her ashes in his room.

Maybe that’s what he needed to do. Finally put her to rest the way he should have done months ago. But he also wasn’t going on any adventures anytime soon. And something about the thought of letting her go, especially when he’d just gotten the urn back, felt strangely wrong. He’d been relieved when Sloan had told him Granny wasn’t lost in police impound hell, but . . . now what?

Another thing my family would harass me about.

Hell, there wasn’t much his family would be happy with him for. He recognized the concern on Elle and Liddy’s faces when they’d hugged him good night before leaving the bar. And he hated, hated, being the one everyone was worried about.

He needed something. Something that was his own. Something that he was naturally good at.

Something unrelated to Sloan.

He reached for his phone. Scrolling through his text messages, he found Davy’s number and typed something out before he could overthink it.

Kyle: So, if an ex-Travelog YouTuber were to, say, start their own channel about something like “Top Ten Locations for Rock Climbing in Tennessee,” etc.—how would that fare with signed non-competes?

Three dots appeared immediately, like Davy had been holding her phone when his message came in. Which was impressive, considering she spent most of her time in London, and it was after midnight.

Or maybe she was already up for the day. She was annoyingly a morning person.

Davy: They can stop you from cloning Pathways. They can’t stop you from being a human being who talks about the outdoors on the internet.

His mouth twitched.

Kyle: Meaning?

Davy: Change the format, change the angle, and don’t call it the same thing. Worst case, get a lawyer to slice the clause down to something sane.

A sliver of excitement went through him.

Maybe Tomas had been right, and he’d dismissed his idea about revamping the show into something else because he’d been too bitter.

Kyle: So . . . not Pathways 2.0, but something adjacent, just not too similar?

The phone rang in his hand.

“How’s my favorite producer doing?” he answered in a saccharine tone.