She looks at me and seems to be biting back a laugh. “Thanks. You’re so effusive.”

I nod magnanimously. “That’s what friends are for, right?”

“Is that what we are, then?” she asks. “Friends?”

“Definitely friends, maybe more? I don’t know, we were married once, after all.”

“The best twelve hours of my life, to be honest,” she says in her best Scarlett O’Hara impersonation, and straightens her legs across me, her thighs shaking slightly as her muscles stretch beneath my hands. “The days since have been nothing but a pale impersonation.”

Oliver walks in from the back, carrying a tall stack of books. “G’day. Nice to see you, mate.”

It occurs to me that I’m still sitting with Harlow’s legs in my lap, my hand resting a little too comfortably on her thigh. I blink back up and meet Oliver’s gaze. He gives me a knowing smirk, so apparently it hasn’t escaped his notice, either.

“Dude,” Not-Joe says, emerging from the bathroom with a stack of comic books in his hands. He holds them up for Oliver to see, and the two of them exchange a look. “Look what I found.”

Oliver groans, but I notice he doesn’t actually take the books. “Not again.”

“Again,” Not-Joe confirms.

My eyes follow Not-Joe as he gingerly puts the comics on the glass counter. “Are those Wonder Woman?”

“Yeah. Every fucking time I clean the bathroom. It’s always Wonder Woman.”

Harlow stands and I immediately feel the loss of her warm skin under my palm. When Oliver nods, she says, “You mean people go in there and...”

Oliver nods again, picking up an empty box and using a stapler to slide the sullied stack inside. “Bloody oath. Is nothing sacred?”

Harlow leans over, peering into the box. “Well. I mean... can you blame them?”

She looks up to three sets of saucer eyes, all of us staring, slack-jawed at her.

“Can we blame them for... ?” Not-Joe begins, and lets his question hang meaningfully in the air.

“Oh, come on.” She reaches over and plucks a pristine, plastic-wrapped copy of Wonder Woman from the shelf. On the cover of this particular issue, Wonder Woman is astride a giant seahorse, her lasso of truth suspended in the air above her, while a man in some sort of watercraft attempts to fire a weapon at her. All of this is supposedly happening underwater, though I don’t bother to argue the logistics of how one would lasso a person mere feet above the ocean floor, or how a laser—or whatever it’s supposed to be—would work in this scenario in the first place.

“Look at her!” Harlow says. “Even I’d have a little alone time with Princess Diana.”

“You knew her real name was Princess Diana?” Oliver asks, and I swear to God he looks like a dog whose owner has just beckoned him to the porch for dinner.