“Right,” I say. “Got it.”

  Buster rolls his eyes.

  “Places, everyone,” Lois says. Then: “Action!”

  “You need to let me treat my patient!” I scream, totally unhinged.

  This time Lois can’t stop her laughter. The crew is also amused.

  “Let’s break for lunch,” Lois announces. She walks up to me and adds, “Why don’t you go meditate or something.”

  Then I’m back in my trailer, with an entire hour alone with my sex-thoughts. How have I never thought to check our texts for dirty pics? I take out my phone, scroll backward through our exchanges, and sure enough there’s a Christmas mistletoe dick pic that takes my breath away. I stare at it for ⅛ of a second before I click the phone to black.

  This is not the way I want to experience him the first time. I want the real thing. Breaking records left and right.

  I picture us back in that marvelous bed. I want to be there—need to be there. But in my fantasy, when I make my first reach for him—I freeze. He’s going to notice something’s different. He’s going to feel that everything about me is new at touching him.

  My mother’s voice blasts into my thoughts, welcomingly unsolicited: And this is a problem . . . why?

  Because he’s slept with High Life Olivia thousands of times, but he’s never been with me. And so, with seven hours, thirty-one minutes, and twelve seconds until Sex O’Clock, I decide to introduce an element of surprise. Something spicy. Something distracting—so that Jake won’t notice that the thing that’s new between our sheets is me.

  * * *

  • • • • • •

  Sex O’Clock finds me sipping a dirty martini at Bar 1200 in the lobby of the Sunset Marquis, a place I’ve long thought is the sexiest lounge in town—low red leather booths and candlelight, potent classic cocktails, vinyl crackling through the speakers in the walls, and attractive, hungry people on the make.

  I check my text for the thousandth time.

  Jake, this is Olivia Dusk. I hope this isn’t too forward, but I got your number from a friend. She thinks we’d really hit it off. If you’re not afraid of a blind date, I’ll be at Bar 1200 at eight tonight.

  He made me wait six excruciating minutes before those three reassuring text-dots appeared, followed by:

  See you there, Ms. Dusk. I look forward to making your acquaintance.

  I’m wearing a black dress I grabbed at Bloomingdale’s in the Grove on my way here. Tight, cinched, ruched, short—it’s the kind of thing any straightish man on earth would like. I’ve dressed it up with bare legs, strappy red stilettos, and a chic lack of panties.

  I’ve got on less makeup than I think High Life Olivia wears, and my hair’s in a simple sleek ponytail, rather than the wavy blowout favored in the photos of actress-me online. So as I sit here, munching on the olive in my drink, and I catch a glimpse of myself in the smoked mirror behind the bar, I look more like Real Life me than I have since I arrived. As nervous as I am, this makes me more at ease.

  “Olivia Dusk?”

  I turn, and there he is in a crisp pin-striped suit that makes him look—for a moment—like Glasswell, the talk show host I used to love to hate. This connection makes me nervous, makes me wonder if I’ve made a mistake . . .

  But then he smiles, and it’s all there—the real Jake. The Jake I’ve gotten to know these past few days.

  “You are Olivia Dusk, right?” He’s doing a spot-on impersonation of someone starstruck and nervous. He even acts like he’s blushing, like he can’t find the right words.

  “I could be,” I say and look him up and down.

  “I’m Jake. Jake Glasswell.”

  “Jake Glasswell,” I say. “What a pleasure.” I put my hand in his, expecting a shake, but he draws my fingers to his mouth and presses his lips to my skin—slowly, holding my eyes the whole time.

  “The pleasure’s mine,” he says and slides onto the empty barstool beside me. He signals the bartender—“I’ll have what she’s having”—then spins toward me so our knees are overlapping. “I’m having the strangest sense of déjà vu,” he says. “Have we met somewhere before?”

  I twirl the toothpick in my drink and take a sip. “Maybe inside a bubble in Ibiza?”

  “Where did you go to high school?”

  “Palisades. Class of ’14.”

  “What a coincidence,” he says, narrowing his eyes. “Me too.”

  “Big school,” I say.

  “Enormous,” he whispers, shifting to run his knee up my thigh.

  “But I think I remember you,” I say, teasing. “In fact, I’m pretty sure you used to be cute.”

  “Oh no,” he says, but he recovers quickly, propping an elbow on the bar and leaning in to say: “In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire that on the ashes of his youth doth lie.”

  I swallow. Did this fine-as-hell man just quote a Shakespearean sonnet at me? I could kiss him. I could—wait. I remind myself of the game we’re playing and try to project cool.

  “You should take something for that.”

  He smirks, plays with the stirrer in his drink. “Didn’t you play Juliet senior year?”

  “That’s right. While you were sliding past first base.”

  “So, you remember I played baseball? The truth is, I only tried out because the catcher was hot. But then, mysteriously, she quit.”

  “Maybe she was sick of wading through your fan club of sophomore girls to get to the dugout.”

  “Never happened,” Jake says, “or at least I never saw them.”

  “That’s why I quit debate, too.”

  “What?” He blinks. “I definitely did not have a debate fan club.”

  “No, but Mr. Saltzman thought you were the best. Before you showed up, I was the captain. Then suddenly, I was the co-.” I meet his eyes. “I was pretty mad at you for a lot of high school,” I say, dropping my sex-growl, dropping the High Life, telling it like it was. “You were just . . . everywhere. And I thought, back then, that you were trying to outdo me.”

  “Outdo you?” He sounds stunned. “I was trying to be near you, to breathe the same air as you. I wasn’t trying to compete with you. I was trying to compete for you. I was trying to get you to notice me.”

  “I noticed you,” I whisper.

  “And then there was that one night,” he says.

  “That changed things,” I say.

  “Prom.”

  “I thought you were going to kiss me on the curb,” I say.

  Jake flinches slightly, still trying to play the game, trying to inhabit the reality I’m painting—one where we didn’t kiss, one where we parted ways. His face darkens as I watch him imagine it. His whole life if that kiss hadn’t occurred.

  “Not kissing you, Olivia,” he says in an earnest, impassioned, breathy voice, “was the biggest mistake of my life. The only saving grace . . .”

  There’s a long pause while we stare at each other.

  “The only saving grace . . .” I offer to him again.

  “Is that if I’d kissed you at eighteen, I wouldn’t have known what to do with you.”

  “What are you saying, Jake?”

  “I’m saying that ten years later, I know exactly what to do with you.”

  My body thrums as I take Jake by the lapels. I stare into his eyes, heart racing, knowing—at last—that this is it. I lean in slowly, then all at once, and kiss Jake Glasswell like I should have done ten years ago.

  When our mouths meet, I understand. The way his lower lip fits between mine. He tastes salty from his drink. He smells like a rainforest. His hands know where to hold me and how firmly. Though my eyes are closed, I see. How this kiss changed everything. How love launches ships and world religions. Kissing Jake Glasswell is that good, that right. Across every universe, in every distant crease of time, this is the kiss against which to judge all others.

  We don’t make it out of the bar before his mouth is on my neck, his teeth sinking into my skin, my hands all over him. We tumble through the lobby, crashing into a coat rack, not giving half a damn as we careen past the front desk.

  “Olivia!” a bright British accent calls. “Are you alright?”

  I turn and see who dares interrupt us. “Not now, Eddie Redmayne!” I call and pull Jake’s mouth to mine.

  “Did you get a room?” Jake gasps. I take his tie and tug him toward the stairs that lead to the suites above the pool.

  “Wait,” he says, stopping one step beneath the one I’m on.

  “What?” I almost shout because I can no longer wait. Not if he left his card at the bar. Not if he needs to grab some sort of contraceptive. Not if the hotel’s on fire.

  But it turns out the holdup is that Jake noticed the color of the panties I’m not wearing, and he needs to push me against the wall and put his hands and his mouth all over me. That I can stand here all night waiting for.

  “Let’s go,” he says, and I’m seeing stars as he pulls me toward the hall.

  Somehow I manage to find my key card, and then Jake lifts me up and takes me toward the bedroom, pausing in the living room to give Gram Parsons’s chin a scratch.

  “Hi, buddy,” he says, and I love him for not questioning why I brought a dog to our tryst, why I couldn’t leave him alone in that big house without us all night.

  Jake throws, and I mean throws, me on the bed. The black dress with buttons running up the center becomes a shred. The rip it makes between Jake’s hands is the hottest sound I’ve ever heard.

  As I lie beneath him, fully naked, and his gaze holds mine, I thank God we waited. I pull him to me, yank his tie over his head, unbutton his shirt, and feel that first drop of hot muscled skin on mine. I can’t believe we’ve only been married for five days. Because this feels like a lifetime of making love.

  He drops between my legs and puts his mouth on me, gently tugging until I twist the sheets and scream. As his tongue finds every sensitive fold, I feel how well he knows me. Like he’s the one who drew the atlas of my pleasure. He takes his time, letting me feel how much he likes this work, letting me sink into an ever deeper state of bliss. Then the pressure of his mouth changes, warm and wet and right there on the very center of my clit, and all at once Jake brings me to a gasping orgasm, the likes of which I’ve never known. And intend to know better from now on.

  I lie in sweaty ecstasy as he comes up next to me, kissing a path up my side. We’re still and basking, tracing shapes on each other’s arms, and then I’m greedy to give him what he just gave me.

  I decide not to worry that I don’t know Jake’s tastes like he knows mine. I’ll make up for lack of expertise with overwhelming zeal. Which comes naturally when I’m face-to-face with his beautiful, beautiful cock. I can’t believe he gets to keep this with him all the time. I trace my tongue around his tip, then I taste his full length, before pumping him with double fists and taking both of his balls deep in my mouth.

  “You’re amazing, Olivia,” he says above me, and I sense what to do next. I take him fully in my mouth and suck firmly until he grasps my hair and pulls and lets out the sexiest groan I’ve ever heard.

  “Wait,” he says and pulls away moments before I know I would have tasted him. It’s a deprivation I can’t endure for long.

  “What?”

  “I need to be inside you. I need you. All around me.”

  “You don’t have to ask me twice,” I say, smiling at him, “but please do.”

  He mounts me, bringing the tip of his huge dick to my entrance. “I need your perfect cunt, Olivia. Can I have it, please?”

  “Yes,” I whisper, and then, as he thrusts all the way inside me, my whispers turn to screams. “Yes. You can.”

  My next orgasm erupts, and this time I share it with Jake. He comes with the deepest, hottest thrusts before collapsing on top of me. I lie there for a moment, in a haze of lust and magic, and everything feels new, like we’re the first people ever to make love, the first people ever to inhale.

  Jake pulls me into his arms, tips my chin and kisses me. Crazy after how rough we’ve just played that he can be so tender, that he can be so kind.

  “Olivia?” he asks.

  I nod, gazing into his eyes.

  “Do you ever think how one thing could have gone differently and we wouldn’t be in each other’s arms right now?” He shakes his head to dispel the thought. But it’s in the air between us. “Do you ever think how we might have missed all this?”

  I nod, and then I kiss him so he won’t see my eyes are full of tears. I kiss him until the air is clear of the possibility that Jake and I aren’t here, right now, in every possible world.

  “Room service?” he says.

  “My kingdom for a Rueben,” I say as he picks up the phone.

  I snuggle up beside him, listening to him place the order, feeling his gorgeous hands trace warm circles on my skin, and there’s one thing I know for sure: making love with Jake Glasswell has wrecked me for anyone else. Ever. He’s wrecked me for just about everything except more of him, in perpetuity.

  I’d laugh if I weren’t so serious, if I weren’t starting to realize what this means.

  I can’t leave this life. I have to stay here now, forever.

  We haven’t even tied the record yet.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Do you have any plans to stop being so secretive?” Jake teases the next morning as I hand him a matcha latte at the Japanese teahouse on Wilshire.

  We’ve been busy today, and it’s not even noon. First there was morning sex, then room service, then after-breakfast sex, which stretched the limit of the Sunset Marquis’s checkout time. Then I told Jake there was something I had to do this morning and asked him to come along for moral support.

  We take our lattes to an outdoor table. There’s a pull between us now. An alchemical shift has his fingers tracing my forearm, has my eyes on the tight strip of denim over his zipper.

  Somewhere around the fifth orgasm last night, upside down in a hotel desk chair, I pledged my allegiance to the High Life. Or at least, I decided to see if I could keep what’s great about it here—my relationship with Jake—and marry it with what used to be great about my Real Life—my relationships with my mom and Masha.

  It was one thing to drop in for a visit to a world where I wasn’t tight with my mom, but I refuse to live that way long term. I’ve never gone four days without talking to my mother. I’m not sure the last time I went four hours. And these have been hard, dramatic days. If I’m going to make it here, I’ve got to make up with Lorena.

  We finish our lattes. Jake and Gram Parsons head for the car, but I head back inside the teahouse and get another latte for the road.

  “Looks like someone really got torn up last night,” Jake says as I slide into the car.

  “Someone did,” I say, “but this latte’s for my mom.”

  Jake stares at me. “Did you talk to her? Did she call?”

  “No, but—”

  A dark cloud spreads across his face. It’s the face he made when I said I wanted to talk to Masha at her reception.

  “What?” I ask, my chest tightening with dread.

  “I should have known, your birthday’s coming up,” he says sadly. “Every year around this time, you talk about reaching out—”

  “What stops me?”

  He sighs. “Olivia, you know your mom—she’s not—”

  “Okay, I understand. There’s history here—”

  “That’s putting it mildly.”

  “But something’s different today. I’m different—”

  “Olivia, you always have the best intentions, but—”

  “Please, Jake. Will you come with me to try?”

  * * *

  • • • • • •

  I take the wheel for the short drive to my mom’s house. Feeling optimistic, I turn on one of her recent podcast episodes. A woman from Oklahoma wants to know if she should reconnect with an old flame.

  “It depends,” Lorena says, “on your reasons. Do you want the flame back because you’re lonely?”

  “I want the flame back because my town’s population is eight hundred and seventy-two. Everyone else is taken.”

  “What are you doing talking to me? Run, don’t walk, Oklahoma!”

  I can’t help enjoying the sound of my mother’s voice, but Jake’s knuckles are white on the armrests, his jaw clenched tight. He seems to be girding himself for ugliness.

  But he doesn’t know Lorena like I do.

  “I promise you, Paula,” my mother says to the next caller. “When your sister sees your minivan pull up, it will be hard to hold a grudge.”

  “Hear that?” I say.

  Jake gives me an incredulous look. “Since when do you take Lorena’s podcasts at face value? This is a woman who never once came to visit you in New York, who barely smiled or even spoke to either of us at our wedding—” He breaks off as I park the car. “Olivia?”

  “What?” I say, unfastening my seat belt and looking through the window at my mother’s house. The sight fills me with safety and warmth. The things he just said about my mom are painful, but they’re only true in one world. Where I come from, our love is unbreakable, and that’s got to count for something.

  Jake watches me, waiting.

  “Let’s go,” I say, opening the car door. Gram Parsons spills out and we cross my childhood lawn. I slide off my shoes, letting my feet sink into the familiar grass, thick and cool and spiky. I hatched a hundred dreams running through this grass.

  “Olivia?” Jake says calmly.

  “Jake?”

  “Your mother hasn’t lived here in years.”

  “Oh,” I say, suddenly unable to breathe. “I know that. I just wanted some inspiration.”