It was something to see, especially for someone like Max, who'd never really seen what a happy, loving relationship could be like. His own parents had been...they'd just been a mess, was the nicest way Max could think to put it. Having grown up with that example, he'd pretty much decided he was meant to spend his life alone. Seeing Rory and Chance together, though, sometimes made him question that choice. Then he'd remember he had the blood of two insane, hate-filled, mean bastards running through his veins. That immediately killed off any hope he had of finding someone to grow old...older...with.

Not that forty-three was old, exactly, but damned if Max didn't feel ancient when he wasn't working and had too much time on his hands. Nights in the bunkhouse could just be hell, and often they made Max wish he was a drinking man, or prone to some other sort of self-medicating. Anything to shut off the thoughts and doubts and fears and loneliness that pressed down on him and threatened to smother him in the quiet hours before he could slip out the door and distract himself with work.

Max was confident in his work, and he knew his thick Southern accent could give some people the impression he wasn't too bright, or that he was laid back all of the time. Those people were the ones who weren't particularly bright, making judgments based on something as easily changed as an accent, and Max wasn't in any hurry to correct their thinking. In his opinion, if a person were ignorant enough to make such a snap judgement about him, that person wasn't worth the effort it'd take to set them straight.

Besides which, sometimes it suited him to be so easily categorised and dismissed. At least someone thought they had him figured out--Max was too confused about too many things when it came to himself. He wasn't sure he would ever puzzle them all out, or if he even wanted to. Sometimes it was just so much easier to float along in the comfortable confusion zone--it's what he knew, and if he could only be sure in his uncertainty about himself, well, that was still something.

Maybe even enough. Introspection--ha! Max bet a lot of people would fall over in shock if they found out he knew a big, fancy word like that--just wasn't his thing. That would involve examining his past, and he didn't really want to do that. Any time the past threatened to suck him down and swallow him whole, Max would find a way to occupy his mind.

Usually that involved a lot of reading, sometimes crossword puzzles. He tried that damned Sudoku and decided he'd rather just take a bullet to the head than wrangle numbers around. It pissed Max off to no end that he couldn't ever complete even one of those godawful puzzles, not without looking at the answers in the back, anyway, and what was the point of that?

"Crap, gonna be another one of those nights," Max muttered, tossing his hat on the couch. It bounced onto the floor, and he thought about picking it up then shrugged. It wasn't like anyone else lived here in the bunkhouse with him.

Later, he'd figure that was the exact thought that jinxed him.