“It’s God awful,” I agree.
“I had the bartender make up something called Celebration,” Lola says with a grimace, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “Sorry. I feel like I need a shower now.”
Mia coughs. “That guy must equate celebration with pain.” She steals my beer and takes a swig before turning back to Lola. I so rarely get to hang out with Mia without Ansel attached to some part of her; it’s actually quite nice to get her alone and excited to socialize. She’s sweetly delicate, in the way a little sister might be. “So let’s hear it, Miss Fancy. Tell us about this morning.”
Lola sighs, sipping her water before giving a wide-eyed, awestruck shrug. “Honestly, what is this life, you guys?”
I lean back against the booth and listen fondly as Lola recounts much of what I’ve already heard. In truth, I imagine I could hear it a hundred times and it would never really sink in; I can’t imagine how it must feel for her.
Lola, who by her own admission spends more time talking to the people in her head than to the people all around her, is truly brilliant. As much as possible, I try to temper my reactions to her work, because I know in part it’s carried by my affection for her. And anyway, it’s not like I can blab on to her constantly about how the creator is a fucking genius, and one of the smartest, sexiest people I know. But I do emphasize however often I can to customers that the book itself is fresh and unlike anything I’ve ever read before, and yet it feels familiar.
Razor Fish makes me feel that same buzz I felt as a kid picking up my first comic from the local newsagent. I’d been obsessed with the strength, the battles, the power of a story told in words and color. At age eleven, I was the tallest, skinniest kid in Year Seven—our first year of high school—and aptly nicknamed Stickboy by the class bullies. Even when my mates caught up by Year Eleven, the name still stuck. But by then, I’d towered over the other boys for so long and had begun cycling everywhere. I wasn’t skinny anymore—I was strong, and dominating in school sports. Stickboy was the name of a superhero, not a coward.
I look at Lola and marvel over how similar we are—lonely childhoods turning us into introverted yet ambitious adults—and how central comics have been to both our lives.
But while she’s still floating on the cloud of her new venture, reeling about the surreal offices, laughing about the stiff beginning to the meeting and the explosion of Austin into the room, I need the edge rubbed off a bit, and pick up my beer, taking a sip. I need to file down my senses enough to let some of this process. Truly, Lola’s life is about to change. What has up to this point been mostly a passion for her is quickly becoming a business—which will bring tensions and problems that I can relate to perhaps more than she realizes. Besides, Lola is wildly talented, but she’s still sheltered: Hollywood can make dreams happen, but it can also be harsh and ruthless. I want to push back the uneasy reflex that wants to fuss a bit over her, that worries, that thinks this is going to break her or, at the very least, dull a brilliantly creative piece of her—the part that created all of this in the first place—and I’m not sure it’s worth sacrificing for a slice of the life-dream real estate.
It makes me want to protect her, to tell her to listen to those voices inside her head, because to Lola those voices are more real to her than the majority of those in her life, and have been for much of her life since childhood. It was the same way with me. I grew up with no siblings, and absentee parents. My grandparents took custody of me when I was a kid, but I was eight and more interested in Superman and Batman than I was in what Gran had watched on tele that day or the people who came through my granddad’s shop.
Just as she’s getting to the end—to where the logistical details started to feel as though they were raining down, and it all became more blurry and jargon-filled—her phone lights up on the table and she glances down and then shoves back in the booth, eyes bolting to mine. “It’s Austin.”
That she looks to me right now—not Harlow, London, or Mia—makes my heart light up; a sparking flare thrown into the cavern of my chest.
“Answer it,” I urge, nodding to the phone.
She fumbles, nearly knocking it off the table, before answering at the last minute with a rushed “Hello?”
I don’t have the benefit of hearing the other side of the conversation so I’m not sure what makes her blush and smile before saying, “Hi, Austin. Sorry, no. I just almost didn’t get to the phone on time.”
She listens intently, and we all stare intently, getting only one side of the exchange: “I’m still a little shell-shocked,” she tells him, “but I am okay . . .” She lifts her eyes to scan the table, saying, “Yes, out with some friends . . . just a neighborhood bar . . . in San Diego!” She laughs. “That’s a crazy long drive, Austin!”
The fuck?
I look up at Harlow, who turns to me at the same time, seems to be thinking the same thing. He’s not driving down here, is he? I glance at my watch; it’s nearly ten, and would take two hours.
“I’m excited, too,” she’s saying, and reaches up to play with her earring. “Well, I’ve never written a script before so my goal here is just to be useful. . . .” She giggles at his reply.
Giggles.
My eyes snap to Harlow’s again.
Lola giggles with us. She does not giggle with people she met only hours ago. Unless that person is me, in Vegas—and I fucking prefer to think that situation is unique.
“I can’t wait to hear them . . . no I won’t, opinions are good . . . I know, sorry. It’s loud here. . . . Okay, I will.” She nods. “I will! I promise!” Another fucking giggle. “Okay . . . Okay. Bye.”
She hits end on the call and exhales, before sliding her eyes up to me. “That was Austin.”
I laugh, saying, “So I heard.” Even with an awkward, foreign object suddenly lodged in my chest I can appreciate how exciting this must be, to be so immediately comfortable with the person at the helm of the most important creative work in her life so far.
“He’s not driving down from L.A., is he?” London asks with—if I’m not mistaken—a hint of suspicion in her voice.
I have always liked London.
“No, no,” Lola says, grinning down at the table. “He just joked about it.”
For a few moments we all just sit there, staring at her.
Harlow is the first to break. “Well, why the fuck did he call?”
Lola looks up, surprised. “Oh. Um, he just wanted to know that I was okay after the meeting . . . and that he was putting together some thoughts on translating the first bit into a film.”
“ ‘The first bit’?” I repeat.
She shakes her head in a staccato, overwhelmed gesture and a strand of her long, straight hair catches against her lipstick. I can’t help it; I reach forward to pull it away. But she does, too, and her fingers get there before mine.
I quickly drop my hand and feel the way Harlow turns to me, but I can’t look away from Lola, who is staring up at me, eyes full of silent frenzy.
“Holy shit, Oliver.”
Beside us, London picks up her phone. “I’m going to google this Austin Adams character.”
I’ve always really liked her.
“ ‘The first bit’?” I repeat to Lola, more gently.
“He was saying the studio sees three films,” she practically squeaks. “And he has some ideas he wants to talk to me about.”
Harlow swears, Mia squeals, Joe grins widely at her, but Lola covers her face with a tiny shriek of panic.
“Holy shit!” London yells. “This guy is hot!” She turns her phone out for us to see.
Okay, maybe I don’t like London as much as I thought I did.
Ignoring her, I remind Lola, “This is good,” as I gently coax her arms down. Unable to help it, I add, “He wants to talk to you about it now? Do you have to go to L.A. again tomorrow?”
She shakes her head. “I think by phone at some point? I mean, I can barely imagine cowriting one script, let alone three,” she says, and the
n presses her fingertips to her lips.
“Collaboration is what this one is all about,” I remind her. “Isn’t that what Austin told you earlier today?” Seeing her grow more worried helps me keep my own trepidation at bay. “Maybe in the second and third films you can drive even more of the process, but this is great, right?”
She nods urgently, soaking up my confidence, but then her shoulders slump and she gives a small, self-deprecating laugh. “I don’t know how to do this.”
I feel her hand come over mine, shaking and clammy.
“This requires more alcohol!” Harlow says, triumphantly unfazed, and in my peripheral vision I see her getting up for more shots.
Joe reaches over, rubbing the back of Lola’s neck. “Lola, you’re a star in the middle of a pile of gravel. You’re going to reign.”
I nod, agreeing with him. “You’ve got this. No one knows this story better than you. You’re there to guide it. They are the experts on the film side.”
She exhales, forming her soft lips into a sweet O and holding on to my gaze like it’s keeping her from melting down. Does she know how I want to be her courage?
“Okay,” she says, repeating, “Okay.”
* * *
EVENTUALLY WE MANAGE to polish off five shots each and have moved on from the insanity of Lola’s day to a raucous debate over how the world is going to end. As usual, we have Joe to thank for it, but Lola is rosy and dissolving into her adorable snickery giggles with every impassioned suggestion—zombies, electromagnetic pulse, alien invasions—and at least seems completely, happily distracted.
“I’m telling you, it’s going to be the fucking livestock,” Joe tells us, barely missing Harlow’s wineglass when he sweeps his hand in a total-destruction gesture. “Some sort of cow or swine flu. Maybe some bird thing.”
“Rabies,” Mia says, nodding in drunken slowness.
“No, not rabies,” he says, shaking his head. “Something we don’t even know yet.”
“You’re a ray of sunshine.” London pokes him in the shoulder and he turns to look at her.
“It’s a matter of fact,” he says. “Fucking chickens are going to be our ruination.”
Lola finger-shoots herself in the head and pretends to collapse onto me, convulsing in fake death. Her hair sweeps across my arm, my skin bare beyond the short sleeve of my T-shirt, and for the first time I don’t fight the urge to touch it. I cup my hand over her scalp and slide it down, dragging my fingers through her hair.
She tilts her head and looks up at me. “Oliver must be drunk,” she announces in a slur, though it seems I’m the only one who hears her.
“Why’s that?” I ask. My smile down at her is a subconscious thing; instinct in response to her proximity.
“Because you’re touching me,” she says a little more quietly.
I lean back a little to see her face better. “I touch you plenty.”
She shakes her head and it’s slow and lolling against my arm, finally thumping back against the booth. “Like a buddy. That was like a lover.”
My blood turns to mercury. If only she knew. “Was it?”
“Mm-hmm.” She looks tired, eyelids heavily demanding rest.
“Sorry then, Lola Love,” I say, brushing her bangs to the side of her forehead.
She shakes her head dramatically, one side completely to the other. “Don’t be. You’re my hero.”
I laugh, but she sits up in a surprising burst of movement and says, “I’m serious. What would I do without you right now?” She points to Harlow. “She’s married.” She points to Mia. “She’s married, too.”
Apparently having tuned in, London leans forward. “I’m not married.”
“No,” Lola says, giving her an enormous, drunken grin. “But you’re always surfing. Or bartending. Or busy rejecting men.”
Joe nods, and London slaps his chest playfully.
“So, Oliver is my hero,” she says, turning back to me. “My rock. My sounding rod.” Her eyebrows come together. “Lightning rod?”
“Sounding board,” I whisper.
“Right.” She snaps. “That.” Lola lowers her voice and leans in close. So close my heart is a stuttering, wild thing in my throat. “Don’t you ever leave me.”
“I won’t,” I tell her. Fuck. I couldn’t. I want to wrap her up and carry her around, protecting her from all of the insincere, greedy people she’s destined to meet.
“Don’t,” she says, holding a weaving, threatening, drunken finger in my face.
I lean in, biting the tip, and her eyes go wide. “I won’t,” I say around it, and fuck if I don’t want to lean in farther and nip her lips, too.
Chapter THREE
Lola
I’M A ZOMBIE before coffee, especially after a night of shots and celebration and who knows what else. I don’t even remember walking home from the bar, so I don’t fully believe my eyes when I find Oliver asleep on my couch at 7 a.m.
He’s sprawled awkwardly, so long and angled. One of his feet is flat on the floor; the other hangs over the end of the couch. His shirt rides up to his ribs, exposing a flat stomach cut down the middle with a dark line of hair. Limp-legged, arms askew, and with his neck at an angle that will be sore when he wakes . . .
He’s really here, and he looks amazing.
It isn’t the first time he’s crashed at my place; the loft is only a few blocks from the store so we gave Oliver a key in case he ever needed to let one of us in, fix a leaky faucet, or make a quick sandwich on a break. In the eight months I’ve known him, he’s slept here twice: One night he worked so late before the store’s grand opening he could barely walk to our place, let alone drive home. He was gone before I was awake. Another night we’d gone out after the store closed, and had too many drinks for any of us to operate a moving vehicle. But that time, it had been the whole tangle of us, with random bodies crashing on any available soft surface.
London is already up and gone—surfing, most likely—and I’ve never had the joy of waking up and finding him here, alone. Admittedly, I’m being supercreepy, staring at him while he’s still asleep—and I’ll make every effort to feel bad about it later—but right now I just love seeing him first thing in the morning. Absolutely relish it.
I know it’s only a matter of time before Oliver’s stress about opening the store lessens and he can focus on other areas of his life . . . like dating. Like Hard Rock Allison. Heaven knows he has enough girls hanging out at the store hoping the hot owner will notice them. I don’t like the idea, but I know eventually it’s going to happen. The obliterating distraction of career has been true for me, too¸ and all of the travel recently has allowed me to keep my head in the sand about how much I genuinely like him. It’s allowed me to be happy taking whatever I can get.
But in the past few weeks, even with things feeling more insane than ever, I’ve emerged from the fog. I’ve had to admit to myself that I want him. And last night we were more flirtatious than we’ve ever been. The memory trips a fluttery, anxious beat in my chest.
When we met in Vegas, he was good-looking and interesting and had the sexiest accent I’d ever heard, but I didn’t know him. He didn’t want me? No big deal. But spending time with him—nearly all of my free time, if I’m being honest—and having him be such a fixture in my life has made the minor gnaw of desire grow into this painful kind of ache. Now, I know him, but I don’t know his heart. Not that way. And lately . . . I want to. I want to tell him, Just give me a week. A week of you, and your lips and your laugh in my bed. Just one week and then I think I’ll be okay.
It’s a lie, of course. Even having never kissed him—beyond the quick, soft kiss at our sham-of-a-wedding—I know I would be worse off if I had him for a week and then lost him. My heart would be warped afterward, like a wool sweater loaned to a body too big and growing misshapen until it doesn’t fit quite right anymore. Who knows, maybe I came to Oliver misshapen to begin with. But unlike every boyfriend I’ve had—a couple of weeks here, a month there
—Oliver never seems to poke at the tender spots, needing to know every detail. Instead he’s collected my details as they’ve been offered.
Maybe it’s why he’s still so close to me; I haven’t yet had the chance to ruin it by clamming up exactly when intimacy is needed.
Our first night, while our best friends were breaking headboards in Vegas hotel rooms with their libidos, Oliver and I walked up and down the Strip talking about work. About writing and illustrating, about the portrayal of women in comics, about the books we were currently reading. We talked about Razor Fish, and about his store—vaguely; I didn’t even know early on that he would be moving to San Diego.
It was so easy being with him, like a tiny taste of something delicious I want to keep eating until I explode. Somewhere at the tail end of the chaos on the Strip, I’d grown brave enough to stop him mid-step, and, with a tentative hand on his arm, turn him to face me.
“Our rooms are probably being used,” I started, staring at his chin, before forcing my eyes to his.
He smiled, and it was the first time I realized how perfect his teeth are—white and even, with uniquely sharp canines that made him nearly wolfish—how smooth his lips are, how blue his eyes are behind his glasses. “Probably.”
“But we could . . .” I trailed off, blinking to the side.
He waited, watching me, eyes never betraying that he knew exactly what I was going to say.
I looked back up at his face, finding my bravery: “We could get a room for the night, if you wanted. Together.”
His expression remained exactly the same—Oliver’s amazing poker face held that gentle smile, that nonjudgmental, soft gaze—and he very politely declined.
I was mortified, but eventually got over it, and we’ve never spoken about it since.
Later, when I discovered he’d moved here and we had these people in common, and this passion for comics in common, too, we saw each other all the time and the awkwardness of that rejection dissolved. In its place came sort of a perfect friendship. Oliver doesn’t judge, he doesn’t mock, he doesn’t push. He doesn’t mind my quiet moods, where all I want to do is bend over a scrap of paper and draw. He doesn’t mind when I get worked up over something and babble for an entire hour. He’s honest in this completely easy way when I show him new story ideas. He plays weird music for me and makes me sit and listen because, even if I hate it, he wants me to understand why he likes it. He can talk about everything from Veronica Mars to Gen13 to NPR to car repair, or he can just as easily not talk at all, which I sort of love, too. He listens, he’s funny, he’s kind. He’s entirely his own self, and that easy confidence is only part of what makes him nearly irresistible. The fact that he’s tall, gorgeous, and has the most perfect smile doesn’t hurt, either.