How to End a Love Story(36)
“I don’t know,” he says finally. “Maybe it’s just not in the cards for us.”
“I’d like it to be,” she says. “It seems like it’d be nice.”
He remembers suddenly the first blush of their own romance—that weekend in a rented beach house after prom. He had broken up with his girlfriend Desiree because he knew he was going to college far away and he didn’t want to draw it out, but he’d taken her to prom first because he felt like he owed it to her.
“You’re such an idiot,” she had said, after he’d tried to gently end things in the car on the way to Seaside Heights. She’d made him pull over at a rest stop so one of her friends could pick her up and drive her to the same beach house instead.
Lauren had been someone else’s date that weekend—he doesn’t even remember whose. She wasn’t part of their usual crew. She ran more with the stoners and future art majors. But as the end of high school drew nearer, those clearly defined lines separating their friend groups seemed to blur and he remembers drinks in a hot tub, a game of truth or dare, and a first kiss with damp, clinging hair and searching mouths.
She was the first person he’d called after the accident a week later; she stroked his hair while he cried in her lap. He’d been embarrassed to ask so much of someone he barely knew, but Lauren hadn’t seemed to mind. It had connected them, in a strange way.
“Do you want to get married?” she asks. Then adds, “I’m not proposing. Just wondering, generally.”
Grant laughs and thinks of what he told Helen back at the airport. I’d like to be married someday. He meant it and he thinks maybe that’s why he’s telling Lauren about his mom selling the house. Lauren is a dangling thread that keeps him tied to this place and it doesn’t seem very fair to any of them.
“I do,” he says out loud. “Someday. I should probably do something about that.”
Lauren smiles as she tilts her head. The action is so familiar, his heart kind of aches for it.
“I hope you do,” she says.
When they walk out of the bar, Lauren lingers as she searches for her keys.
“Are you good to drive?” Grant asks.
“I’ll be fine,” she says. “The drinks get weaker here every year.”
She considers him. “Are you heading home?”
There’s an invitation in that question, somewhere. One last time, maybe?
“I am,” he says. “Get home safe.”
“You too,” she says.
She reaches out and touches his cheek softly, brushing a thumb against his stubble.
He catches her hand suddenly and presses a kiss to the back of it. She laughs, surprised.
“Well, that’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever done,” Lauren says. “Merry Christmas, Grant.”
It starts snowing as she says it, and he feels like they’re living out the end of someone else’s rom-com. Maybe every movie ending has extras in the background just trudging through toward the rest of their lives.
“Merry Christmas,” he says back to her.
She opens her car door, then pauses. “You deserve to be happy. I hope you know that.”
Lauren smiles and Grant feels a complicated knot in his stomach tug as he tries to return it. After she gets in her car and drives off, he stays standing there, fat snowflakes floating down from the sky and dusting his hair, his shoulders, and the ground beneath his feet.
He pulls out his phone and numbly swipes until he finds the name he’s looking for. He presses dial before he can talk himself out of it, and he realizes he’s holding his breath, because it releases as soon as he hears the voice on the other end.
“Hello?” Helen says, her voice low and quiet.
“Do you want to get lunch tomorrow?” he asks, as if this is normal for them, as if he calls all the time. “I have to finish clearing out my uncle’s house in the morning, but I’m free afterward and I think I might lose my mind if I spend another day at home alone.”
There’s a pause, then the click of a door shutting in the background. Helen sounds closer to the phone when she speaks again.
“Send me the address,” she says.
Eleven
She tells her parents she’s going to meet up with a friend and drives to a bagel place in the next township over. Helen makes a mental note to bring back a half dozen bagels and prepares a story of breakfast sandwiches shared with an old friend from the Ampersand who’s unexpectedly in town. It feels almost like espionage, if the stakes were toasted cinnamon-raisin bagels. She feels a fluttery kind of nervousness when she walks through the door and sees him standing in line—their rendezvous point.
“I haven’t been here in forever,” she says, trying not to sound like she’s read too many spy novels. “We used to get giant bags of bagels here to sell at our morning fundraisers for the school newspaper.”
“I remember,” he says.
They order breakfast sandwiches to go and drive to Washington Rock to eat them. There’s a short, pitiful excuse for a nature-walk trail by the far end of the parking lot, and he suggests they take it. It’s a gray, gloomy Christmas Eve, and it seems unlikely they’ll see anyone else there. There are patches of snow on the ground from last night, though not enough to hide the muddy, leaf-covered path.