I realize it’s a cliché but everything changes for me after that shower. I don’t think I’ll ever love anyone the way I love this man.
While we get dressed in silence, he keeps looking at me with this strange mixture of awe and relief.
“You’re okay though?” he asks again from across the room, pulling clothes out of his dresser.
I nod, mute.
I love him. I love him more than anything and it’s obliterating everything else around me.
He comes over and studies me, cupping my face in his hands. “Lola Love, you’re not okay. Is it me? Is it what we just did?” His face grows tight.
Shaking my head, I stretch, sliding my arms around his neck and pressing my lips to the warm, clean skin there. He bends, holding me tight. I want him to hold me all day long. I want to keep the rest of the world at bay, and just be here, with Oliver, until it’s time to climb back into bed again.
* * *
I AM DAZED, drunk. I climb the steps to my apartment slowly, exhausted but in the best way.
The loft is quiet—London is most likely surfing—and I grab a cup of coffee before heading to my room to start working on the ever-expanding list of deadlines. I haven’t checked my email in over a day, and still don’t want to now. I like the bubble.
And I’ve barely slept. I glance at my computer, the stylus sitting so innocently on the digital sketchpad, and I know how much I need to get done today but I also know how much a tiny nap will help.
I fall into bed, closing my eyes and trying to focus on Junebug unfolding, her story and who she is. But instead my mind keeps bending back to all the points of tenderness on my body, just to remember. I hear Oliver’s voice in my ear, remember every one of his kisses.
I wake only when it’s dark out and my stomach gnaws with hunger.
I lift my phone, blinking in surprise at the number of notifications on the screen.
I’ve missed four calls from numbers I don’t recognize, and two more from one that I do: my publicist, Samantha. I swipe the screen and immediately call her.
“Sam,” I say quickly. “What’s up? I fell asleep.”
I can hear the smile in her voice, the way she’s struggling to stay calm to keep me calm. She’s never shown me a second of stress until now. “Oh, okay, I’ll reschedule the calls. Don’t even worry.”
“What calls?” I ask, sitting up and pressing my palm to my forehead. “Shit, Sam, what calls?”
“The Sun,” she says, adding, “the Post, and the Wall Street Journal were all today. I knew it was tricky on a Saturday, I’m sorry, it just seemed easiest to move them all so they could run Monday. We’ll reschedule for next week.”
Something breaks inside me, some panic unbottled and poured everywhere.
I apologize, hanging up, and staring at the wall in horror. I spaced three interviews today. I missed a deadline by two weeks. I don’t even know who I am anymore, and the one thing I’ve always known is how to write, how to draw, how to work.
My phone buzzes in my hands, and I glance down at the picture of Oliver on my screen. My first instinct is to answer, to stroll to the bed and lie down and listen to the honey of his voice pour over me.
Instead, my breath gets cut off in my throat and I hate myself so much in the moment I flip my phone over, putting it facedown on the desk before knocking it to the floor. I have to work. I have to dive in, and work, and finish all this. I’m dropping things—not just dropping, abandoning them. I just need to draw one line, and then another, and another, and another until I am done.
The only thing I can do right now is build words and images into a story unfolding and then I will be okay.
I will be okay.
Chapter THIRTEEN
Oliver
THE HOURS SEEM to bleed together after Lola leaves, details around me fuzzy enough to ignore. The sun beams directly into my kitchen, into the windscreen as I drive, in through the front windows of the store, washing out everything around me, bleaching away color. I don’t want to do anything but be with Lola, in my bed.
As weekends go, it’s a slow one; WonderCon up in Anaheim has most of the local geeks out of town. And I’m grateful for it: I’ve never not felt like working at the store, but this stage of my relationship with her—the hunger, the obsession, the clawing ache all along my skin to be touched, to fuck, to come—brings a delicious distraction. I indulge these daydreams; I hide in my office to avoid conversation with Joe so that I can stare off at the wall and remember waking up, kissing Lola’s warm breasts, following her into the shower.
I tried to be slow, gentle. I was shaking, rigid, and nearly out of my mind when I realized what she was letting me do. She came on my fingers, promised me it was good, but I don’t think she realizes how it changed everything for me.