How to End a Love Story(107)

“Oh,” she says. Oh.

“Then you’re supposed to curl up and protect your head,” he continues, from between her thighs.

“That’s, um,” she says, and loses her train of thought, as his tongue strokes just there. “Ah.”

“Drop down, cover your head, and hold on to something solid,” Grant says, his low voice reverberating against the hot core of her.

“Grant,” she pants needily. “Please.”

He gives her what they both know she needs, and she bites her lip as the mounting tension breaks and an orgasm sweeps over her.

Grant resurfaces above her then, and his arms are braced around her in a way that makes her feel safe and loved, even as she isn’t sure if the tremors are coming from her body or the building.

“Think you’ll be able to remember all of that?” he asks as he repositions himself at her entrance.

“Yes,” she gasps as he pushes himself inside.

“Good,” he says in a strained voice. She loves watching him like this, when he’s wrapped in her heat and he’s close enough for her to watch every expression flicker across his face. His eyes are laughing even as the muscles at his throat work rather spectacularly. “Practice saying that for me.”

Helen squeezes him with her inner muscles, and his lips wordlessly form her name as he fills her to the hilt.

“You want me,” he prompts, and her breath hitches as he withdraws from her.

“Yes,” she answers, and he surges back in.

“Louder,” he demands, and withdraws again. “You love me.”

“Yes,” she says, louder, and he rewards her.

“You’ll stay with me, then?” he asks, burying his face in her neck.

“Yes, yes, yes,” she echoes, as he drives into her in a primal kind of rhythm, until her world splits apart and reassembles to the sound of his echoing climax.

Afterward, the air seems to be thrumming with something warm and familiar—a glowing, unspoken thing between them. Want me, love me, have me, keep me, her pulse races to communicate.

“We’ll have to figure out what to do about your parents,” he says then, and she laughs, out of breath.

“My parents are the last people I want to think about right now,” she says, and covers her eyes. “We’ll figure it out.”



It’s a rainy, early-September morning in Dunollie, New Jersey, when Helen announces Grant’s reappearance to her parents over FaceTime two weeks later. She can see the sparse branches of the trees rattling outside the windows behind them, and she thinks, the weather is so different here.

“I, um, I started seeing someone, in LA. I’m moving to LA. It’s serious. It’s . . . it’s him, it’s Grant. I’d like you to meet him. He’d like to meet you, when we’re getting my things in New York in a few weeks. But if you can’t be nice to him, then we won’t come.”

Mom blinks and laughs and makes that low, clucking sound she sometimes makes of scathing disapproval, then stands from the couch abruptly and leaves.

“I thought you were done with that,” Dad says. “Anyway, you don’t even know what’s going to happen. Who knows, in a year, maybe you will feel different. You shouldn’t bring up these things until you are more sure.”

“I am sure,” Helen says.

“You are very young,” Dad insists, and she thinks, I’m 32. “Don’t make decisions so quick.”

Grant squeezes her hand when she hangs up and looks over at him, an apologetic expression on her face.

“Let’s go to the beach,” he says, before Helen can apologize for family histories and complicated backstories that can’t be rewritten. “The weather’s perfect.”



It’s snowing outside the New York Public Library in January, and she’s pretty sure he’s going to propose. He knows she knows, she’s certain, because he keeps glancing at her and shoving his hands in his coat pockets, only to produce his phone.

“You’re so annoying,” she mutters as they present their bags to security and Grant makes a show of hiding his bag from her.

“You love me,” he answers, and whisks ahead of her to the reading room.

They sit beneath perfect blue skies painted on the gilded ceiling and pull out their laptops at a long wooden table in the back. Helen’s working on revisions for her memoir—her book of essays sold to her YA publisher’s sister imprint and has been newly retitled Sending All My Love. Grant has a pilot he’s revising, a heady, straight-to-series sci-fi world of his own creation. His spec script sold in a heated auction and has been cited hopefully in the trades as proof of the lingering value of original ideas in a marketplace of perpetual adaptation.

The two of them have been talking about coming to work here together for months—a chance to rewrite over the memory of their last near miss. Helen loves the silence of this place, the church-like atmosphere among fellow bibliophiles typing away in quiet industry. After about ten minutes, she realizes Grant absolutely hates it.

“Hey,” he whispers, and earns a few glares from the studious patrons around them. To be fair, it’s his third time speaking in the last minute, and it’s always been something mundane like “Can you move your chair?” or “Do you have the Wi-Fi password?” or, right now, “Can I borrow a pen?”