How to End a Love Story(47)

She embarrassed herself with how easily, how quickly and certainly, she would have thrown herself at him if he’d leaned down just a fraction of an inch closer. And then what?

Helen shakes her head as she pulls into the driveway of her parents’ house. There is no and then what with Grant Shepard. There’s no world in which a night of temporary, sanity-obliterating horniness ends in anything but regret and awkwardness and avoidance and . . . and what if it’s too late and this ruins everything once we get back to LA?

She sits in the car, tapping her finger against the steering wheel. She thinks about those first uncomfortable weeks in the writers room, when they barely ever looked at each other—as if it was the last month of their senior year all over again.

No.

It’s not too late. It’s fine. Technically, nothing happened. We didn’t cross any lines that can’t be uncrossed. In a few months, Grant will forget this next-to-nothing even happened.

Helen nods to herself, takes a steadying breath, and heads into the house.



She’s avoiding him.

Grant glowers at the call log on his phone. He hadn’t called on the morning of the twenty-seventh. He had needed time to think and, if he was honest, replay the events of the previous night a few more times until it was permanently tattooed in his memory.

He did call on the twenty-eighth, but she didn’t pick up and he thought he’d give her a full twenty-four hours to call him back. Twenty-four turned into thirty-six. He knows she’s still in town—he saw an Instagram story she posted getting bagels. He tried texting her—a carefully considered what are your new year’s plans?

It’s around nine a.m. on the thirtieth now and she still hasn’t responded.

He thinks about driving down to her house and banging on the door like a caveman until she answers. And then what?

And then he’d drag her back to his cave and finish what they started.

He laughs at this surprisingly primitive thought. But he doesn’t know where she lives—somewhere at the base of the mountain, across the highway. And what if someone else answered the door? What then?

He pushes away the what then. What then doesn’t matter if she won’t even fucking talk to him. Does she expect to be able to avoid him until they’re back in LA? What then? Are they supposed to sit in a room and pitch storylines and jokes and pretend he didn’t jack off three times this weekend to the thought of other things he could have done to her warm, willing body while she was still beneath him?

His phone dings and it’s embarrassing how quickly he grabs it, only to relax when he sees the name—Kevin Palermo.

Heard you’re in town! NYE party at my spot, come thru.





It’s followed by a second ding—a cheesy graphic inviting him to Kevin’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve Party, along with address details.

Grant exhales. He doesn’t want to go to Kevin Palermo’s Rockin’ New Year’s Eve Party—it gets sadder every year as more and more of their old friends have kids and babysitters to get home to. He can think of a hundred things he’d rather do than sit in Kevin’s parents’ basement listening to a Spotify playlist of pop hits from the early 2000s. At least ninety of those things involve Helen Zhang and her interesting mouth. Screw it, all one hundred of those things.

On the other hand.

He tries to think past the angry haze of lust. Maybe a passive, neutral approach would be best.

Grant thinks of the way she tapped her finger—so prim and admonishing—against his lips when he violated whatever insane rules she had privately determined for this game of “who can make the other person hornier without technically running any bases.”

I’ll be at Kevin Palermo’s new years party tomorrow.

Come if you’re around?





He forwards the graphic invitation along and ignores the feeling in his gut that says she might not come, she might be done with you already.



Helen calls herself a fool at least twenty times in the Uber to Kevin Palermo’s house. Does Kevin even know she’s coming? Does he remember who she is? Would it be worse if he did?

She fidgets and pulls the skirt of her dress down slightly. She only packed so many clothes for this trip, and none of them particularly appropriate for a New Year’s Eve party. After debating a last-minute trip to the mall and nixing it for being too pathetic to entertain, she decided on a black silk slip dress she packed as a nightgown. It’s honestly too cold for a slip dress, but it clings to her ass in a flattering way and her pride won’t let her show up in a shapeless sack of a sweater dress, as she did the last time she saw Grant. She added a leather jacket and a spritz of perfume, laughing at herself the whole time. What for? She told her parents she was going to an old friend’s house, and they didn’t mind because they had plans of their own with Theo’s parents in Edison.

Helen rings the doorbell and a pretty brunette in a clingy silver turtleneck dress answers the door. She tilts her head, studying Helen, then her pouty lips break into a smile.

“It’s you,” she says.

Helen runs the smiling brunette against a mental Rolodex of possibilities and arrives at— “Hi, Lauren.”

Lauren DiSantos looks Helen up and down.

“Long time no see,” she says.

Grant Shepard’s hometown sex friend is gatekeeping me from this party. Helen wonders if it’d be more mortifying to turn and run back into the Uber and tell the driver to take her home. Or to Siberia. Maybe the North Pole.