Reaching for something behind the couch, he pulls out a Barry White CD and an ice bucket with a bottle of champagne. “To the happy new couple!”
Oliver laughs, a single short burst of delight—always so easy, never makes it awkward for anyone—and takes the bottle from Greg. “Allow me the pleasure.”
“I don’t think I had any say in the matter,” Dad jokes.
I squeeze my eyes closed. It’s both the best and worst thing that the two of them are such good friends.
The panel shows the girl, throwing a frying pan into the air and standing quietly beneath it.
I pat both their shoulders as I walk past them. “If anyone needs me for this self-congratulatory wankfest I’ll be in the backyard.”
Dad calls after me—“Don’t you want a glass of this New Relationship Champagne, Lola?”—but I’m already through the kitchen, pushing out into the crisp open air.
It’s gorgeous out. Passion fruit vines crawl heavily up the fence separating our yard from the Blunts’, weighing down the ancient wood so that it bows toward our lawn. During the summer days there are so many bees inside the web of leaves that I used to imagine they could work in concert to lift the leaves, the fence, the yard, our house from the earth and take us somewhere else, like pulling a sticker from paper. When the fruit grows ripe, it falls from the vine, making a tiny popping sound against the hard earth below. I close my eyes, remembering the feel of the vibration of the bees above as I would crawl into the vines and feel along the ground for ripe fruit to take inside.
I feel like I haven’t breathed in days, but now that I’m away from L.A. I can. I’m aware of the tightness high in my throat and how it eases, a fist unclenching. Tension still knots my stomach. I have so much to do.
The script isn’t even finalized; Austin and Langdon compromised by letting me edit the version we came up with, on the condition that I don’t revert any of the agreed-upon changes back to the original version. Erik has given me two weeks to finish Junebug, which is good because soon after that, I leave on another book tour, and return a week later to the first day of principal filming on set. I’ve never had to juggle this much before, and every time I have to switch my headspace from movie Razor Fish to book Razor Fish to Junebug, it feels like learning how to write all over again. I am a reservoir, slowly draining water.
From the house, I hear Oliver’s low voice and then Dad’s burst of laughter followed by the pop of a cork. Despite the twisting worry in me, I bite my lip as I smile at the sound of their indistinct words, spoken in happy, easy tones. They’re a bit over-the-top when together, but I knew this about Dad already and still brought Oliver to dinner. They’re so genuinely fond of each other, and that knowledge is both a relief and terrifying.
The voices inside disappear and then the screen door creaks behind me, slow footsteps make their way down the back stairs, and I feel a long, warm body settle beside me on the lawn.
I lean into his side, closing my eyes and wanting to roll on him, luxuriate in the feel of him.
“Where’s Dad?” I ask.
Oliver slides an arm along my back, cupping his fingers into my waist. His mouth finds my neck and he speaks into it: “Putting the finishing touches on our Coming Out dinner.”
I laugh, closing my eyes and taking a deep breath.
“You don’t like how he’s taking all of this?”
“I do. . . .” I hedge. “It’s just like having a new haircut. You want everyone to like it but you don’t really need everyone to notice it quite so intensely.”
He bends, kissing the corner of my mouth. “You hate this sort of attention, don’t you? You want this, us—Loliver,” he says with a smirk, “to be a fact. Settled. Old news.”
I smile up at him, a million beating wings let loose in my heart. “Or maybe I want him to smile and be quietly knowing, but let me be the one who’s giddy over Loliver.”
“That’s rather selfish,” he says, teasing. “And for the record, I’ve never known your dad to be quietly knowing about anything.”
I bite my lip, looking up at him. His mouth is skewed by a tiny smile and I can tell he’s teasing, but he’s also not. “I know.”
He turns to me, rubbing the pad of his index finger along my bottom lip. “Greg’s happy for you.” Pausing, he studies me while I manage several short, shallow breaths under the gentle scrutiny. When he says more, his voice is quiet. “I get the sense you haven’t brought many boyfriends home.”
“Or any,” I say and his gaze becomes heavy, dropping to my mouth. “You’re the first.”
“You’ve had other long-term boyfriends, though?”
Reaching up, I touch my fingertip to his chin. “I wouldn’t call you and me long-term yet.”
He laughs. “I guess that depends on your definition; we’ve certainly been building up to this for a long time. I mean someone you’ve been with long enough to want to bring home.”
“Are you asking me how many people I’ve been with?”
A smile curves his lips. “Not directly.”
I laugh, telling him, “You’re my fifth.” He makes a little grumpy face I’ve never seen before, and I ask, “Do you want me to ask you?”
“You can,” he challenges, meeting my eyes and maybe knowing I won’t actually ask. I wait, and finally he laughs through a wince, “Though I don’t actually know. There were lots of random nights in uni. I’m going to guess around thirty.”
I nod, looking back over to the fence and holding my breath until the sting evaporates from my lungs.
“You don’t like that answer,” he says.
“Did you like mine?”
Laughing, he agrees: “Not really. In my ideal world I took your virginity the other night.”
I roll my eyes. “Guys are so ridiculous about that.”
“Well, clearly not just guys,” he argues. “You also don’t like that I’ve been with other women.”
“I don’t like the idea that you’ve loved other women.”
He can’t help the cocky flicker of a smile that flashes on his lips. Oliver leans close, mouth sliding up my neck to my ear. “Well, I don’t think I’ve ever loved anyone quite like this. In this sort of giddy, obliterating game-changing way. Where I can see myself with her for the rest of my life.”
This feels so new, so bare, so exposed. I wonder if Oliver realizes how scary it is for me to bring him here, to admit—even if I can’t say the three tiny words myself—that I care that he loves me. As soon as we open our hearts up to love, we show the universe the easiest way to break them in half.
Thirty women. It’s not that it’s a surprise or particularly jarring, not after the initial sting, anyway. It’s that it’s new after months of never discussing these things. I can’t decide if I love or hate how everything I learn about him makes me feel like I don’t really know him at all. I know what art would make his eyes go wide, which movies he hates and which he loves. I know what to order him if he’s late to meet us at the Regal Beagle, I know that he’s an only child and that he doesn’t like ketchup. But I don’t know his emotional heart at all: who he’s ever imagined he might love, how he’s been hurt, and what kind of boyfriend he’s been to some of those women. What might send him away.
His hand comes up to my back, rubbing in small, slow circles.
“I missed you,” he whispers.
God, my heart. “Me, too.”
“Why did you not call me more?”
I shrug, leaning into his shoulder. “I didn’t know what to say. The meetings were hard. I missed a really important deadline. I went to a weird place.”
“What deadline?” he asks, pulling back to look at me.
“Junebug,” I say, and feel the now-familiar roll of nausea over it. “It was due two weeks ago.”
“It was?” he says, eyes wide. “I didn’t—”
I nod. “I know. I had the date right in my calendar, but in my head I thought it was next week. Even if it was next week, it would be late.”
“How can I h
elp?”
It’s weird—but wonderful—to hear him ask this. Weird because it comes out so easily, so readily, and for the first time I really do see what Harlow meant about me being clueless: this sort of question has been second nature to Oliver for as long as I’ve known him.
“I don’t know. I’m going to dive into it all tomorrow morning.” I squeeze my eyes closed, wanting to put that aside, just for another couple of hours. “Anyway, I’m sorry I didn’t call. I didn’t like being away. But then I didn’t like not liking being away.”
He laughs quietly. “That makes perfect sense.”
“I took sleeping pills a couple of the nights.”
I feel him turn to look at me. “Yeah? Do you need that usually?”
“No. But work was really stressful and I sort of turned into mute Lola.”
“Still a version of the Lola I love,” he says, kissing my hair. “I know her well.”
Away from him I felt crazy. Next to him, it’s easy to just spill it all and it doesn’t seem so strange. How did I manage to be away for three days?
He slides his hand into the back of my hair. “You’ll stay over tonight?”
I should say no but it’s not like I’m going to get a lot of work done tonight anyway. Tonight, I need this. I need the Oliver Reboot. Tomorrow, the crackdown begins in earnest.
I nod and turn my face to him just as he leans close, putting his lips on mine. Slightly open. Just barely wet. The tip of his tongue touches the tip of mine and it’s a match struck against pavement.
I’m over him, pressing down, needing relief in that aching part of me. Aching parts: between my legs. Inside my ribs. I want to believe I can breathe without him but I’m not sure, and I don’t know what’s more terrifying: thinking I could never be alone again or trying it.
I hear a quiet cry escape my throat. “I missed you.”
He kisses me again, whispering, “So did I. Come here, Lola Love.”
He draws his tongue across the seam of my mouth, encouraging me to open again. I feel his quiet groan, the urgency behind his touch when he cups my face and tilts his head, getting a better angle. Steam is rushing through my blood, too, urging my hips to fall into the instinctive easy rhythm. Desire flashes hot along my skin when my body remembers sex with him. I want every touch to turn into something deeper and wild. He growls and bites my lip when I grind my hips over him, needing to see if he’s hard already, as immediately desperate as I am.
But he shifts me back—reasonably—and I know the backyard of my dad’s house isn’t the right place for this. I can’t take him in small doses yet. I’m not used to kissing him enough to have just a taste.
Pulling away, I lean my forehead against his, catching my breath. It seems like instead of having five senses I now have twenty; everything inside me buzzes with sensory overload.
“Sorry,” I whisper.
“I still don’t really believe you’re on my lap like this.” He runs his hands up my sides. “Do you know how many times I touched myself to the fantasy of you sitting on my lap, fucking me while I suck your perfect tits?”
I burst out laughing, slapping a hand over my mouth as I glance back at the screen door.
He kisses my chin, his calm smile slowly straightening into a sweetly curved line. He suddenly seems thirty years older than me. He handles this infatuation so well. “We’ll finish this later.”
When I nod again, he guides me off his lap and we lie down, shoulder to shoulder, staring up at the sky. It feels like an enormous ocean above us, swimming with stars. Oliver’s hand finds mine, his long fingers curling around and between.
“Tell me more about L.A.,” he says.
I groan, taking a few breaths to collect my thoughts. “I started Razor so long ago, I don’t think I remember the stumbling at first. But going up to L.A. was like ice water dumped over my head. I felt naïve and useless in these meetings—about my own story—and then when I would go home at night to work on Junebug, it was like I couldn’t even get started.”
He hums sympathetically beside me, lifting our joined hands to his mouth to kiss the back of mine.
“I missed you and was obsessing about us, and couldn’t stop worrying about how I was coming off in these meetings.” I look over at him. “There were three of them: Gregory—don’t call him Greg, by God—Austin, and Langdon.”
“Gregory Saint Jude?” he asks, “He did Metadata last year, right?” He’s obviously more familiar with these names than I am—I had to do some quick IMDb’ing on my phone in the hall the other day—and I have a pang of embarrassment all over again.
“Right. And he’s fine. He didn’t really engage me much, but Langdon is a total douche. Initially Austin said Langdon really connected to the story, but let me be clear. He doesn’t. Or, maybe he does, but as a forty-something dude who wants to bang Quinn.”
Oliver groans. “So did you finish the edits?” he asks, and I can feel his head turned, the weight of his eyes on me.
“No, we got through it but they’re letting me have two weeks with it to ‘put my polish on it,’ whatever that means,” I say. “There are so many things I’m not allowed to change, and the things I am aren’t really details I care about. I don’t care about Quinn’s clothes.”
He sighs, turning his face back up to the sky. “I’m sorry it was frustrating, pet. That sucks.”
I nod. “It’s okay. We’ll figure it out. I’m just glad to be back with you tonight.”
“Same.” He kisses my hand again, and after we have spent several minutes looking up at the stars in silence, the screen door squeaks open and I feel Dad up there, looking down at us. I know what he sees: his daughter lying on the grass, holding hands with a man for the first time in front of him. I can’t imagine what he feels, if it’s bittersweet or only sweet, or as terrifying for him as it is for me.
“Dinner,” he calls quietly.
Inside, he’s set the table with placemats and napkins tucked into brass rings. A candle is lit in the middle and when I look up at him to scowl, his eyes are more anxious than teasing. I can tell he knows he’s gone a little overboard and I give him a reluctant smile instead.
Oliver sits beside me on the opposite side of the table from Dad and we serve ourselves in silence. Without me here they’d be laughing and eating unself-consciously. Without Oliver here, Dad and I would be laughing and eating unself-consciously. In this case, two is not better than one.
Dad clears his throat awkwardly and looks up at us. “I am really happy for you two,” he says.
I open my mouth to beg for us to change the subject, for the love of God, but Oliver senses something I don’t, and covers my knee with his hand beneath the table, squeezing.
“Thanks. It’s pretty great so far.” He smiles at Dad before taking a bite of salad.
“Friends first,” Dad says, nodding.
“Friends first,” Oliver repeats.
Dad sips his water and then gazes at me, and I see what Oliver must have: Dad usually hides behind teasing humor, but now he’s showing rare emotion. “Lola’s mom and I met at a bar.” He tilts his head, smiling. “Dove straight in. Turns out, we were better at being enemies, but when we were friends, it was awfully nice. I want you to have someone who’s better at being a friend.”
Raising my eyebrows, I give him a we’re-going-to-talk-about-this-here-and-now? face and he laughs a little. We don’t talk about Mom anymore when it’s just the two of us, let alone in front of someone else; there just isn’t very much unexplored territory. As of this summer, she’s been gone one year longer than they were married. I know the basics any child would know: They had a decent marriage—not a great one—but weren’t actually together in one place very often because of his deployments. When he was discharged and returned home, things were too hard for her. As an adult, I’ve deduced that Dad forgave her long ago and thinks she probably hates herself too much for leaving to ever try to talk to me again.
I think she’s a coward who shouldn’t bothe
r.
Tom Petty sings about free falling in the other room, and the melody has this way of making me feel like time loops in this slowly expanding arc. We just go around and around and around, and part of me will always be twelve while the rest of me ages, navigating the world with one parent who cared enough for two.
Gratitude for my father swells in me until I feel my breath catch in my throat.
I cover Oliver’s hand with mine, grateful for the tiny breath he forced me to take, the step back for perspective, and ask Dad, “Where’s Ellen tonight?”
I can tell he’s happy that I brought her up: his smile cracks across his face and he launches into a very detailed explanation of her work schedule and late dinner plans with friends. Oliver’s hand is a distracting warmth beneath mine: tendons and bones, smooth skin, sparse hair. I want to lift it from the table, press it to my face.
* * *
OLIVER DRAWS SMALL circles on my thigh as he drives us home. If I didn’t know better, I would think he was doing it absently, but I’m finding that he doesn’t do anything without intent. He’s quiet but deliberate, relaxed but always observing.
“Where do you want to have sex?” he asks, staring straight ahead.
I turn to grin at him. “Right now?”
Laughing, he says, “No, I mean, some crazy place you want to do it someday. Right now I’m driving to my house for the sex.”
I hum, thinking. “Small World ride at Disneyland.”
He glances at me and then back at the road. “A bit of a cliché, maybe? And illegal, I’m guessing.”
“Probably. But every time I’m on it I can’t help but think about what it would be like to sneak in there and find a dark corner.”
“At night, maybe,” he agrees quietly. “Away from everyone. We’d take off just enough for me to be able to get inside you.”
I swallow, pushing his hand up my thigh as I imagine his pants hanging low on his hips, the definition of muscles framing the soft hair on his toned stomach, how fast and frantic he would move in me.
“Would you want the ride to be going while I was fucking you in there?” he asks casually, clicking on his right-turn indicator.
Dark Wild Night Page 18
