How to End a Love Story(22)
She comes downstairs and finds Grant sitting up sleepily on the pullout couch, his brown hair still tousled with sleep, as Tom and Eve bustle in the kitchen.
“Morning,” she says, hoping her face isn’t as red as it feels.
“Sleep well?” he asks casually.
“Mm,” she says, as if any more syllables would betray her.
She glances at the bathroom door behind her. “Do you need . . .”
“You go first,” he says, glancing down quickly. “I need a minute.”
“Oh. Okay.” She rushes into the bathroom as her brain flashes a neon sign advertising the sudden pressing knowledge: Grant Shepard has an erection right now.
Eight
“It’s a tricky scramble here,” Suraya calls back to them.
They go on a hike after breakfast for their second day of the retreat and Helen has never been more certain she is not a fan of the great outdoors. She enjoys the occasional nature walk, but steep inclines and roads less traveled hold little practical romance for her.
“I’m with you, girl,” Owen says, as she audibly whines at the sight of the scramble.
He’s wearing a necklace beaded to read “Happy Camper,” yet is decidedly anything but. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a brightly colored bag of gummy candies.
“Edible? It’ll kick in when we get back to the cabin so we can forget this godforsaken mess,” he offers. “Plus I heard a rumor there’s s’mores waiting for us back there.”
“Ooh, are we sharing? I want one,” Nicole says, and Owen passes her an innocuous-looking dark purple gummy.
“Um,” Helen says.
Her one experience with cannabis was in college, when she unsuccessfully tried to smoke with her roommate and spent a full hour repeating, “I don’t think it’s working.” She was labeled a buzzkill and never invited to participate again. She still associates marijuana with a slightly bohemian, laissez-faire, underground lifestyle that’s cooler than she ever will be, though she knows it’s been legalized in California for so long that driving past high-end cannabis dispensaries that could front as Apple Stores has become a normal part of her daily routine.
“I don’t usually do edibles,” she says, hoping she doesn’t sound painfully uncool.
“God, I know, I just pass out and I’m completely useless after I take one,” Eve says behind them. “On the bright side, that might get me out of the next corporate bonding exercise.”
Owen offers Eve the bag of gummies. “They’re ten milligrams each.”
“Oof, I’m old, I’m gonna have to split it,” Eve says. She takes a bite of half, then taps her husband on the shoulder. “Here,” she says, and feeds the other half to him.
“Did you just drug me?” Tom asks.
“All the cool kids are doing it,” Eve says, and jogs ahead, laughing.
“It’s cute how they keep the spark alive in their marriage,” Owen says, then shudders. “Couldn’t be me. Helen?”
Helen blinks. Don’t be the buzzkill.
“Well, if all the cool kids are doing it,” she says, and gamely takes an edible.
The gummy tastes like a blackberry Sour Patch, with an unmistakable hint of weed in the aftertaste.
“How long do you think it’ll take to kick in?” she asks.
“I dunno, maybe forty minutes, maybe two hours?” Owen shrugs.
Off Helen’s expression, Owen laughs suddenly. “Oh, babe, tell me this isn’t your first edible?”
“I’m from the East Coast,” Helen answers.
Owen claps an arm around her. “This is gonna be fun,” he promises.
Helen laughs, feeling strangely light—surely it’s too early for the edible to be working already?
As Nicole and Owen help her up the scramble, she realizes—it’s not the edible, it’s the feeling of acceptance. It suddenly seems to mean a lot, that she was invited to participate.
She’s never felt particularly secure in her friendships back in New York—Pallavi and Elyse had friends they seemed slightly closer to, outside of their trifecta. And there was always an air of competitive friendliness in Helen’s wider YA author circles that often made her doubt if any of them actually liked each other, or if they were just performing for their readerships on Instagram. She could never quite shake the feeling that she wasn’t a particularly vital member of any group—she wasn’t the fun one, or the good-at-planning-things one, or the model-hot one.
So she threw herself into her work and presented her achievements like bargaining chips in her social circles—See how useful I am as a friend? Don’t I seem valuable as a long-term investment, even if I’m not that fun? More than one person has introduced her as “Helen, my most impressive friend.”
She hasn’t been particularly impressive in this writers room, though.
Maybe being bad at things in front of other people is the secret glue of friendship.
The thought lights up like a Christmas tree in her stomach, and that’s when she realizes the edible has kicked in.
Oh no, she thinks with a laugh, I’m thirty-one and peer pressure still works on me.
About an hour into their hike, Grant is painfully aware that about half their party is high off their asses.