Dark Wild Night

“WHEN DID YOU know, Oliver?”


I look up across the table and grin. “Know what, Harlow?”

“Don’t be cute.” She glances to the side to make sure Lola is still at the bar. “When did you know that the movie was optioned and green-lit in one swoop?”

She looks back and forth between Joe and me, waiting, but Joe bends to take an enormous bite of his burger, leaving me to answer.

“Today,” I hedge. It’s a bullshit answer because even Lola only found out this morning. Harlow wants me to report down to the hour.

Harlow narrows her eyes at me but tucks her smart reply away when Lola returns, carrying a tray of shots. She glances over at me and gives me her secret little grin. I’m not even sure she knows she does it. It starts with her lips turning up at the corners, eyes turning down just slightly, and then she blinks slowly, like she’s just captured me in a photograph. And if she had, the image would show a man who is deeply, bloody lovesick.

There’s a scene in Amazing Spider-Man 25, when Mary Jane Watson is first introduced. Her face is obscured from both the reader and Peter Parker, and up until this point, Peter has only known her as the girl his aunt wants him to ask out on a date, “that nice Watson girl next door.”

Peter isn’t interested. If his aunt likes her, Mary Jane is not his type.

Then in issue 42 her face is revealed and Peter realizes just how amazing she is. It’s a gut-punch moment: Peter’s been an idiot.

This is as good an analogy as any to describe my relationship with Lorelei Castle. I was married to Lola for exactly thirteen and a half hours, and if I were a smarter man, maybe I would have taken the chance while I had it, instead of assuming—just because she was wearing a short dress and getting drunk in Vegas—that she wasn’t my type.

But a few hours later, we were all drunk . . . and impulsively all married. While our friends defiled hotel rooms—and each other—Lola and I walked for miles, talking about everything.

It’s easy to share confidences with strangers, and even easier when drunk, so by the middle of the night I felt quite intimate with her. Somewhere the Strip turned dark, hinting at the seedy underbelly the city has to offer, and Lola stopped to look up at me. The tiny diamond Marilyn piercing in her lip caught the light, and I grew mesmerized by the soft pink of her mouth, long since rubbed free of lipstick. I’d lost my buzz, was already thinking about how we’d deal with the annulments the next day, and she quietly asked if I wanted to get a room somewhere. Together.

But . . . I didn’t. I didn’t, because by the time she made it an option, I knew she wasn’t one-night-stand material. Lola was the kind of girl I could lose my mind for.

Only, as soon as she returned to San Diego her life exploded in a hurricane. First, her graphic novel Razor Fish was published and quickly stampeded onto every top-ten list on the comic scene. And then it went mainstream, showing up in major retailers, with the New York Times calling it “the next major action franchise.” The rights to her book have just sold to a major motion picture studio, and today she met the executives putting millions into the project.

I’m not sure she even has a millisecond of time to think about romance, but it’s fine; I think about it enough for the both of us.

“I don’t know who started the tradition that the birthday girl cuts her own cake,” Lola says, sliding a shot glass of questionably green alcohol in front of me, “or this new version where the girl whose movie is being made buys the shots. But I’m not a fan.”

“No,” Mia objects, “it’s that the girl who is about to run off to Hollywood buys the shots.”