Dark Wild Night

His eyes smile first and it spreads down to his mouth. “One thing at a time,” he repeats. “But just don’t buy a house. It’ll be a huge waste of money.”


Stretching to kiss his chin, I suppose now is as good a time as any to tell him I honestly don’t know if I ever want to be married again, I don’t know how to do any of this and am pretty sure I’m going to fail . . . a lot. “But I don’t—”

His fingertips come over my lips and he covers them with a small kiss. “Shh. We are not our friends. We have our own path, okay? I’m just being optimistic here.”

With a smile, I pull him down with me onto the sand and we sit and watch the moonlit foam of the curling surf. Oliver tells me stories about his first year in the States. I tell him stories about the year my mother left. We grow quiet and nearly fall asleep on the beach before we wrestle each other awake and halfheartedly argue over what to get for dinner.

I’m so lucky.

I’m so lucky.

The panel shows the girl, and her boy, raised hands dusted in sand as they try to count the stars.





Acknowledgments


LOLA’S LESSON WAS also ours: sometimes you need to do it all wrong before you know how to do it right.

We hope you had no idea that we wrote this book twice. The first time, it took us three months. It was a good book, but it wasn’t Oliver and Lola’s story. The second time, it took only five weeks, and we knew as we put the words on the page

this

this

this is Loliver.

Thank you to Adam Wilson for seeing it. You didn’t tell us how it should be, but you knew how it shouldn’t be, and—as always—you were right. Did you have to do a couple of shots before that phone call? We certainly had to do a couple shots after. But we’re so glad you know these characters as well as we do, and that these books matter as much to you as they do to us.

And thank you, Holly. You called it a barnburner, you wore Ansel’s corsage, and you’re available and present for all of the tiny and enormous moments. It means a whole, whole lot, but you get that, because you’re Holly.

Erin, you’re there at the drop of a hat with some of the most astute and detailed feedback. It’s amazing the things you find that we miss after twenty reads, but your brain is magical, and your enthusiasm is kiiiiind of everything to us. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

This job is an obscene amount of fun, and partly that’s because we get to write about hot people doin’ it, but mostly it’s because we have Kristin Dwyer, Kresley Cole, Alice Clayton, and Nina Bocci keeping inappropriate humor alive. What would we do without you guys? Let us not imagine it.

Thank you to our prereaders Erin Service, Tonya Irving, Sarah J. Maas, and Alex Bracken. Yours are the opinions we need to hear, and you’re never wrong. Marion Archer, thank you for taking the time to read it so carefully. Your feedback was not only what helped us finish this polish, but what also tied so many tiny pieces together. Thank you, Lauren Suero, for the tremendous amount of work you do every day, Jen Grant for being Team CLo since day -365, Heather Carrier for the graphics that still make us react audibly, alone, in our offices. Thank you, Caroline Layne, for the unbelievable illustrations that brought Loliver to life.

We love everyone in our Gallery family: Jen Bergstrom, Louise Burke, Carolyn Reidy, Adam Wilson, Kristin Dwyer, Theresa Dooley, Jen Robinson, Sarah Lieberman, Liz Psaltis, Diana Velasquez, Melanie Mitzman, Paul O’Halloran, Lisa Litwack, John Vairo, Ed Schlesinger, Abby Zidle, Stephanie DeLuca, Lauren McKenna, and Trey (later, skater).

This book is dedicated to Eddie Ibrahim, the original Oliver who pushed us to embrace our fandom side, gave Lo all the gateway comics so long ago, and has long been the bedrock beneath our wiggly foundation. We adore you, Superman, we really do.