How to End a Love Story(21)

“We don’t need to know how that sentence finishes,” Owen insists. “I’m done, I’m sleepy. Let’s bless this mess and go to bed.”

Saskia insists on burning some sage in the room before they clean off the board. Helen has the strange feeling that she should thank Grant for some reason, but he heads off to bed without a backward glance at her. So she stays to help clear the room of stray mugs and empty bottles of alcohol instead.

“We drank a lot more of this stuff than I thought,” she says, a warm and spicy feeling in her belly as she examines an empty bottle of Southern Comfort.

“Suraya’s special recipe,” Saskia mumbles.

A thunk upstairs catches their attention. “Ow,” Grant’s familiar rumble sounds.

Saskia giggles. “He’s too tall for the top bunk.”

Grant appears before them a few moments later, bundled in his comforter. “I’m sleeping out there,” he grumbles, moving toward the door.

Helen blinks. “You can’t sleep out there. There are—bears and shit,” she says.

Grant looks sleepily amused. “Bears and shit,” he murmurs.

Helen jerks her head toward the love seat between the two pullout couches. “Sleep there.”

“And wake up a human accordion? No thanks,” he says, and moves forward.

“We’ll take the bunk beds, then,” Saskia says. “You can have our pullout couch. Right?”

She nudges Helen.

“Right,” Helen says.

Grant yawns. “I’m too tired for chivalry. There’s two empty bunks up there,” he says, and drops onto the nearest mattress.

Saskia and Helen head up the stairs. Only two top bunks are left, and Saskia takes the one closest to the bathroom. Helen turns off the light and clambers up her own, careful not to wake a gently snoring Owen on the bottom bunk. She realizes her mistake as soon as she gets there—it’s Grant’s, and he brought the comforter with him downstairs.

“Grant Fucking Shepard,” she mutters to herself.

She climbs back down using her cell phone as a flashlight and tiptoes downstairs. She shuffles through the furniture in the darkness, until she finds the pullout couch. Grant’s breathing is shallow; his eyes are closed and his features relaxed. He’s already asleep.

Helen shines her flashlight nearby and finds spare sheets piled near the discarded couch cushions. She creeps past him to retrieve them, when strong fingers suddenly catch her wrist and pull her forward.

She throws up her free hand to stop her fall, it lands on bare skin, and her pulse stutters.

Grant sits up, radiating heat, very much awake.

“What are you doing?” he asks in a low rasp.

“The bedsheets,” she manages. “You took the comforter with you.”

She is painfully aware that her right hand is still pressed to his chest, and if anyone were to throw on the lights, they would look like a tawdry pantomime of a romance novel cover.

He looks down, as if just waking up to their surroundings. He laughs to himself. “Right. Sorry. Give me a second.”

He releases her and she feels the cold air rushing back to her body in his absence.

“I can just take the sheets,” she murmurs, moving for them.

“No, it’s fine, just—take the comforter.” He throws it at her.

She catches it and drops the bedsheets onto his mattress.

She pauses at the foot of the bed. “Um, good night,” she says.

Her eyes have adjusted to the darkness, and she can see his eyes glinting in the blue shadows.

“Night,” he says back finally.

Helen turns and runs upstairs. She can’t help but feel like she’s fleeing the scene of a crime, which is ridiculous. She spreads her looted comforter onto the top bunk, crawls beneath it, and— She’s instantly wrapped in the scent of Grant Fucking Shepard.

Her breath catches—it feels too intimate to breathe in; she feels too exposed even in the dark. She pulls the duvet over her head, creating a full cocoon as her senses are flooded by Grant. She can smell the wood from the burning fire he stoked downstairs, the salt of his sweat mixed with his aftershave—something spicy and woodsy at the same time.

Her mind replays the millisecond of him asking, “What are you doing?” on an insistent loop, a mental record skip as her wrist feels the phantom sensation of his grip. In her mind’s eye, he seems to pull her just a hair closer each time.

I’m a pervert, she thinks as she takes a final deep inhale of his comforter before pulling it down below her shoulders.

If she’s careful, if she doesn’t sink into her pillow too much, if she turns and keeps from burying her nose in the fabric surrounding her (why does every instinct in her body tell her to do it?), she can avoid him.

After a few slow breaths, she becomes either too sleepy or too used to it to notice the woodsy, intimate smell of Grant Shepard in her bed anymore and drifts out of consciousness.

She dreams of warmth and a solid chest and a strong body surrounding hers, overwhelming her senses.

“What are you doing?” she asks in her dream.

“What do you think?” he answers, as he moves against her, mouth covering flushed skin, every touch a fevered kind of promise.

She wakes up with a jolt, on the brink of an orgasm, and bites her lip to stop from weeping in frustration. It’s early morning and she can hear creaking downstairs as people get dressed. She exhales shakily, inhales, and steadies her breathing before she sits up.