Mia scrunches her nose, shaking her head at Oliver. She almost never understands his thick Aussie accent, which is ironic considering she’s married to someone who speaks English as a second language.

“Happy fanboys no matter what,” Lola translates in shorthand.

I remember the first night we hung out with Oliver—after Mia and Ansel disappeared down the hall and it was just me and Lola, way drunker than the two strangers in front of us. After closer inspection, we realized Oliver had a black Sharpie flower drawn on his cheek.

“I’m curious about the flower,” Lola said when he’d settled onto the seat next to her. He wore his usual thick-rimmed glasses, black straight jeans, dark T-shirt. I was almost positive it wasn’t a face tattoo... almost.

“Loss a bit,” he said cryptically, and then returned to silence. It took several beats for me to recognize that he’d said, “Lost a bet.”

“Details,” Lola said.

And Finn supplied them happily. Apparently they’d just done an abbreviated version of the biking trip across the States that brought them together six years earlier. “The deal was, whoever went through the most tire tubes had to get a Sharpie face tattoo. Oliver here can’t help but treat a road bike like a mountain bike. I’m surprised his tire rims don’t look like tacos.”

Oliver shrugged, and it was clear to me he couldn’t care less that he had a flower drawn on his face. He was definitely not there to impress anyone.

“Do people call you Ollie?” Lola asked.

Oliver looked at her, completely dumbfounded by the possibility of this nickname. She may as well have asked him if people call him Garth, or Andrew, or Timothy.

“No,” he said flatly, and the only thing charming about him was the way his accent seemed to run through every vowel with one syllable. Lola’s eyebrow twitched in her single tell—mildly annoyed—and she lifted her flashing LED drink cup to her lips.

Lola wears mostly black, including her glossy dark hair, and has a tiny diamond pierced into her lip, but, even still, she’s never been able to pull off the full physical manifestation of the angry Riot Grrrl. With her perfect porcelain skin and the longest eyelashes in the world, she’s simply too delicate. But once she decides you’re an asshole, it no longer matters to her what you think. She gives good glare.

“The flower suits you,” she said, tilting her head to study him. “And you have pretty hands, kind of soft. Maybe we should call you Olive.”

He grunted out a dry laugh.

“And a really beautiful mouth,” I added. “Gentle. Like a woman’s.”

“Aw fuck off.” He was laughing outright by then.