: Chapter 6

I RARELY TAKE A day off—in fact, I haven’t taken an entire day away since the store opened four months ago—but I need it today.

I sleep in, have coffee on the back porch, and watch a mourning dove build a nest in my eaves.

I run a few miles along the water, to Cove Beach and back.

I get the car serviced and washed.

I clean the house, shower. Eat and dress.

And I give myself the entire day to think about what’s happening with me and Lola.

I want it to be conscious—intentional—between us. I don’t want to slide into something with her without thought, not only because our friendship is one of the best and most important of my life, but because even though we don’t talk about it much, I know her relationship history isn’t particularly positive.

Harlow has hinted that Lola’s few relationships have ended after only the briefest life spans, that Lola tends to keep men at an emotional arm’s length, and that she spooks easily. Even if I hadn’t seen the spooking with my own eyes two days in a row—at my house, at the store yesterday—I could have figured it out after a single conversation with her father where I learned the most telling detail of Lola’s life: her mother left when she was twelve, without even saying goodbye. It’s like a bruise that sits just under her skin, one that darkens whenever she lets herself get too close.

The store is pretty dead when I stop by just before I’m supposed to meet Lola. Joe is a great employee, but instinct tells me to not let a full workday go with him alone here.

“You missed a dude with a huge box of Tortured Souls figures about an hour ago.” Joe watches me drop my keys onto the counter, adding, “I feel unclean. I’ve seen some crazy shit in my day, but that stuff scares me.”

“Says the man who pierced his own cock.”

He laughs, stepping aside as I log in to the computer system. “I know,” he says. “But have you seen those figures? They’re babies in bottles of liquid and tortured people gestating their own murderer.”

“So what did you tell him?” A good deal of our business is the buying and selling of collector’s items: action figures, comics, graphic art. Joe has a good eye for stuff but doesn’t really have the same background in the scene that I do. The official rule is that if Joe isn’t sure whether he should buy something, he tells the person to come back when I’m here. In the first few weeks, he rarely knew what to buy and what to leave, but he’s a quick learner and I no longer panic that he’ll let something unbelievable slip through our hands.

“I told him we get a lot of kids in here and it’s not our thing.” He shudders visibly and then does a slight double take. “Why are you so dressed up?”

“I have a thing,” I say.

I can practically hear his eyebrows go up. “ ‘A thing’?”

Sliding my eyes over to him to give him a mild glare, I squat down, and cut open a box of office supplies. To be fair, I don’t ever have things.

Joe steps into my peripheral vision and then bends down until his face is about five inches from mine. “A thing?” he repeats.

“For fuck’s sake,” I grumble, handing him a few boxes of pens. “A thing up in L.A. tonight with Lola.”

The three seconds of silence that follow communicate a good deal of incredulity. “Is it a date?”

I shake my head.

“Are you sure it’s not a date?”

I reach up, sliding a new box of business cards onto the counter. “Pretty sure.”

“Because lately she’s been looking at you like she might want—”

I cut him off. “It’s not a date, Joe.”

The bell rings and I hear someone walk in, heels clicking on the linoleum floor.

“This is the last time I’m going to ask you,” Joe whispers. “Are you sure it’s not a date?”

I open my mouth to say something sharp, but stop when I hear Lola ask, “Where’s Oliver?”

“On his knees under the counter,” Joe says breathily, and I look up to see him smiling widely down at me.

Her unsure speechlessness fills the room.

I shoot Joe an annoyed look. “Down here,” I tell her, and wave a roll of receipt tape over my head. “Just putting some stuff away.”

“Uh-huh,” she says, leaning over the counter so I can only see her face. I realize how utterly fucked I am if I think I can play it cool tonight. She looks bloody gorgeous. “Hi.”

I put the last roll of tape away and almost swallow my tongue when I stand and finally see the rest of her. Lola wearing leather pants should be illegal. Couple that with shoes I would happily die impaled on and a top that hints at everything underneath but shows nothing? I have zero chance of not making a fool of myself in one way or another tonight.

“You look amazing,” I tell her, and without thinking, walk around the counter, lean in, and press a kiss to her cheek.

She doesn’t react as if what I’ve done is out of the ordinary, just smiles and says a quiet, “Thank you.”

Her eyes slide to where my wallet and keys rest on the counter, but I’m not done taking her in yet. Her hair is up in a high ponytail, sleek and black. Her bangs cut straight across her forehead, and her makeup isn’t heavy, but I can tell she’s wearing it. Soft black lines her eyes, pink flushes her cheeks, and her lips are an unholy, nearly sinful red.

“Oliver?”

My words come out sort of shaky: “You look really pretty.”

This time she laughs. “Thanks,” she says, adding, “again. London helped. I swear giving the two of us makeup is like giving a monkey a hammer.”

When I step away to grab my things, she makes a show of slowly looking me up and down. I follow her eyes as they linger on what I’m wearing: slim trousers, simple, dark button-down shirt. I even polished my boots for this woman.

“Damn,” she says. There’s appreciation in her voice and I realize that we’ve always done this—flirted, dropped subtle innuendo—but it’s never felt this loaded before.

“I’m glad you approve,” I say. “I’m parked around the corner.”

She follows me out, saying goodbye to Joe. And then she takes my arm and smiles up at me. “I definitely approve.”

Yep. I am fucked.

I’VE ALWAYS KNOWN Lola to grow quiet when she’s thinking about something that’s troubling her. I assumed that the reason she doesn’t tend to talk out her problems the way Harlow and even Ansel do is that she wants to take the time to sort through it on her own first. But when she brings up the conversation with Austin in the car, and wants me to list some of the pros of his ideas, I lock up, wondering whether the reason she likes to take so long before talking about things is that she doesn’t always trust her own judgment.

“I’m not sure I could argue the merits of either suggestion,” I hedge, merging onto the 5 North freeway.

“Just for the exercise,” she says. “Why might it be better for Razor to be from another planet?”

I sit quietly, thinking on the question. But my mind reflexively fights it; they’re both shit ideas. Quinn shouldn’t be made into a sexual creature. Razor isn’t an alien. There’s no reason to change it.

The tires trip easily over the road and Lola stares out her window while she also thinks about it. It’s these easy moments where I seem to plummet deeper in love with her.

“I guess it could allow them to do something cooler visually?” she muses after a few minutes of silence. “Some more creative way to flash back to his life before without just a panel shift.”

Shrugging, I say, “I guess, but Razor’s alternate time in the book is just as visually different in flashbacks as another planet would be. I mean, the way you do it is unique, but time shifts are done elsewhere, too. The Multiversity collapses all parallel timelines into the Hypertime.”

“I know, but maybe that argues Austin’s case. Multiversity collapses all of the DC timelines to explain how they all could exist. Maybe the idea of parallel time is easier to grasp there because people want a way to reconcile all the various takes on the same characters.”

“I think yours is simpler,” I say, adding, “more elegant, I mean. It starts with the idea of a parallel time loop. It doesn’t use it to explain things in hindsight.”

She hums, nodding at this. “I guess I’ll just need to hear what they say. It’s so easy to do something when it’s just me and a book and my ideas. It’s different when I expose it all to this larger collective consciousness.”

This thought lands heavily between us. She’s going to let Austin and the screenwriter try to convince her? And maybe she should. But I can’t help but feel like I wouldn’t. Like a man in her position maybe wouldn’t.

“It’s not because you feel cowed by him?” I ask her.

Lola tilts her head. “It’s not my expertise,” she says, adding, “Film, I mean.”

“But the story is. Razor is. Quinn is.” Quinn is you, I want to say. Don’t let him change you. Don’t let him sexualize your journey from ruin to triumph.

Nodding, she looks back out the window. “I know. I’m just thinking about how I want to handle it.”

“What if he insists Quinn be eighteen?” I ask her. “What if he says without a romance angle in the story, it won’t float in Hollywood?”

Lola turns and looks at me, and I catch a flash of fury in her eyes before I have to look back at the road. “He might be right,” she says. “That’s what sucks. It might need romance to work as a commercial film. We didn’t sell this to an art-house indie. We sold it to a major studio. Profit is the key. And I knew that going in.”

I see what she’s saying but it twists me, tightly. “You wouldn’t push back?”

“Of course I would,” she says. “And I know what you’re saying, but I guess I want to make sure I do it right. You should have seen the meeting. Angela and Roya got maybe three words in, and they’re the executive producers here. And contractually, I only have so much input.”

“Really?” I’m aware of the comic community’s ongoing discussion about feminine representation on the page and in creative staffing, but I still find myself surprised that Lola’s film might not be hers after all.

She nods. “I’m twenty-three. I’m the first female comic creator to have a major motion picture, and I’m one of the few people out there writing and illustrating it all. If I was Stan Lee or Geoff Johns walking in there—or even just some nobody guy with my age and experience—I could tell them what the fuck to do and they would listen. A man having strong opinions and pushing back right away is someone with sound business sense. If I walk in there as Lola Castle and push back, I’m pushy and hard to work with. Maybe someone will even use the word bitch.”

I feel my jaw go tight. I know she’s right, but still. “That’s fucking bullshit.”

“It’s the way the world works,” she says. “The first question I always get asked is what it’s like being a woman in the comic industry. Every single interview. The second question is whether any of my girlfriends read comics.”

Fuck. I never thought about the interview aspect before. They seemed like reasonable questions, but with a step away from it, I can see it’s utter shit.

“Do you think anyone would ever ask Brian Michael Bendis whether he has any male friends who read his comics?” she asks.

I laugh, but it isn’t really from humor. “Probably not.”

“We fight these perceptions one meeting at a time, but it’s why I want to be strategic about the battles I pick,” she says. “I need to convince myself first that these changes are absolutely unacceptable because I’m sure there are other things down the road that will floor me, and I don’t want to be excused from the conversation before it even starts.”

And there, right there, I want to propose.

I want to pull over and climb from the car, and get down on one knee on the dusty, narrow shoulder of the freeway. Because Lola knows it’s bullshit, she knows she needs to tread carefully. And she’s figuring out the best way to fight for what she’s built.

MILLION-DOLLAR HOMES PEEK out from behind lush trees and iron gates before we turn onto Sunset, parking in a sleek underground lot.

The lifts are spotless, marble floors polished to a shine. We’re on a list in the lobby; another list is checked upstairs. Lola takes my hand as we walk in but it isn’t romantic; I’m sure that much is clear to both of us. It’s what we would do before stepping off the side of our world and into another. It’s about having an anchor.

This is the kind of party where everyone is wearing black, and the waiters—most likely models or actors—wind their way through the room with silver trays covered in beautiful hors d’oeuvres and flutes of champagne. Music is loud so people are forced to speak over it. The room isn’t bursting with partygoers, but it sounds that way.

Some guy spots us from over near the bar and throws his hand in the air, calling out to Lola.

He’s shorter than I am by several inches, and is dressed so casually—in a T-shirt and jeans—in a roomful of meticulous people, it strikes me as a bit douchey.

“Loles!” he calls and comes up to hug her tightly . . . and for a while. Jesus. If my math is on, this is only the second time they’ve met. “I’m so glad you could make it!”

She thanks him for the invite and turns to gesture to me. “Austin, this is my friend, Oliver.”

“Oliver,” he says in surprise. It gives me no small pleasure that he has to tilt his head to look up at me. I can tell immediately from his little smirk that he’d planned to fuck Lola tonight, and I certainly hope he is recalculating his odds. I may not know if I claim Lola’s heart, but I sure as fuck know that this man could never claim a single inch of her.

Sorry, friend.

He extends his hand, shakes it firmly. “Nice to meet you.”

“You as well.”

There’s no more for us to say, really, and after a few more seconds endured of silent eye contact, he turns back to Lola.

“I want to introduce you to some people.” He scans the room, pointing out a few names we might recognize from where we stand.

The guy in the black pants and shirt is a screenwriter. The other guy in black pants and shirt is a director. The woman in the black cocktail dress is VP at some studio.

And Lola just fits in. The girls always joke that Lola looks like some kind of badass superhero, and it’s true. There’s a strength about her, a quiet confidence that comes from setting out to do something and getting it done.

“Now come on,” Austin says to her, and she grabs my hand. Her palm is clammy, fingers trembling. “Let’s go find Langdon.”

I hold back and because we’re now attached at the hand, Lola is gently jerked back, and looks at me.

“Go do your thing,” I tell her quietly. “I’m going to get a drink and something to eat. I’m fine.”

“You sure?” she asks.

“Totally.” It occurs to me only now that it’s going to be late when we’re done, and neither of us may be up for the long drive home. “But should I book a couple of rooms at a nearby—”

“Already handled,” she assures me with a smile.

My heart starts to thunder in my chest, and Lola doesn’t immediately turn. “Thanks for taking care of that.” It feels right to bend down and kiss her jaw, just shy of her neck, so I do.

I may have just crossed a line, but I can tell when she smiles at me and squeezes my hand that she doesn’t mind.

AT THE BAR, I drink, I eat, I people-watch.

It’s a fascinating study, and in such stark contrast to my everyday. I have the most casual of clientele; have always run in circles that were more comfortable with grub than polish. Literally no one I know other than Harlow and Ansel—and now Lola—would blend in here. But this is Lola’s new reality and so, in some ways, it’s also mine.

She finds me after about a half hour and slides onto the seat beside me. “Hey you.”

“Hey.” I put my drink down and take her hand, squeezing. I’m relieved to have her back. Despite my confidence that Lola would never go off with someone like Austin, I didn’t particularly relish being separated from her. “How did it go?”

She smiles and nods at someone across the room. “It was good,” she says through her grin, holding it. “I think. They have a lot of ideas. I sort of tried to listen.” She looks back at me, adding, “Without judgment.”

“That bad, huh?”

Shaking her head, she says, “Not all of it. It’s just weird when something so personal isn’t just mine anymore. Langdon already has a lot written, I guess. I’m trying not to knee-jerk all over the place.”

“Want to talk about it later?” I guess.

She nods, and when the bartender checks in with her, she leans in to order a drink over the din of the crowd. He mixes it in front of her while she watches in silence, looking like she very clearly needs it. She takes the glass from him with a smile that’s returned a little too enthusiastically for my liking, and turns back to me.

“So what do you want to talk about?” I ask.

“We’re at a pretty fancy party, and you just sat at the bar alone for a half hour while about fifteen executives checked you out and mentally took you home to their creepy L.A. sex dungeons.”

I laugh. “Lies.”

“Not lies,” she says, leaning in and making a funny face. “What’s your best pickup line?”

“I don’t really have a line. I just sort of sit there, like this.” I shift my knees apart and give her the blue steel.

“Wide stance,” she says, with a grin. “I like what that communicates to the room.”

I make a show of straightening my glasses and motion to myself. “I mean, you put out the honey, you’re going to get some bees.”

Lola smacks my shoulder, laughing.

Nodding at her with a sexy little wink, I say, “Baby, I know we’re gonna fuck, it’s just a matter of how we get back to your place.” I lean in, for dramatic effect, whispering, “I don’t have a car.”

When Lola laughs, her head tilts back, exposing her perfect skin, long, slim throat, and the sound is higher than one would guess from hearing her sultry voice, more girlish. Her laugh, when she’s at ease, is adorable in a way Lola would never admit.

“That’s my new favorite,” she says when her laughter dies down.

I love when she says favorite. The way her mouth forms the f. She kisses the air. It makes me think about moving over her, capturing those lips in a kiss when she gasps out a pleading “Fuck.”

Her eyes meet mine and they’re smiling, unaware of how far my thoughts have taken me. “How could anyone ever say no to that?”

“Honestly,” I tease, “I haven’t a clue.”

“What’s this like for you?” she asks me and then looks around the room.

I shrug, following the path her eyes have taken. “Weird, I guess. But not. It’s not altogether different from what I expected. Sort of a departure from the shop, I reckon.”

She smiles at me. “You’re the biggest geek I’ve ever known.” When she says it, I hear pride in her voice. To Lola, this is the ultimate praise.

The bartender sets another whiskey in front of me and I thank him with a nod. “This is true,” I tell her with a bit more mocking in my voice. “And yet, here you are, enjoying this evening with me anyway.”

“It must be the alcohol,” she says, sipping from her little straw.

I nod to her drink. “That’s your first one.”

She smiles. “You’re observant, I like that.”

“One of my many attributes. Along with hardworking, good at maths, and punctual.”

She shakes her head, swallowing a sip quickly so she can contradict me: “Hey, at the top of that list should be the accent.”

“You’re saying my accent is more important than my ability to do multiplication tables in my head?”

Lola laughs, and if I’m correct, leans just a bit closer. “Why don’t you date more?”

I hesitate with my glass perched on my lips, and then take a drink before setting it down again. Lola absolutely sounds like she’s teasing me, but there’s an edge there, like she’s inching closer to something she finds a little scary.

“Shouldn’t I be asking you that?” I tilt my head, thinking. “Austin seems interested.”

Lola grimaces, folding her arms on the bar and looking at me. “You’re not answering my question.”

“Neither are you.”

“And why is that?” she asks, watching.

“Probably for the same reason you don’t.”

Lola stirs the straw in her drink, using the tip of it to pierce the lime slices one by one, and just beside me, someone opens a door to a patio, letting in a blast of cold air.

“Do you want to leave?” she asks, looking up at me. “Go someplace more our speed?”

I open my mouth and the cool air hits my tongue like a spark of electricity. “Sure.” I wonder how it’s possible that the hammering of my pulse feels louder than the music around us.

Holding out her hand, Lola gives me her secret little smile. “Well, then . . . let’s get out of here.”