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 help?”
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.