How to End a Love Story(5)
Helen nods. “All the feelings. Like the first day of school.”
She’s pretty sure this is an honest response, though she isn’t sure feelings is the best categorization for the tangled threads of thoughts in her head. She needs this to go well. She needs to prove this was a good decision, abandoning her life in New York for a Hollywood sabbatical. She needs to fix this uninvited mental block that has her starting and scrapping book proposals for new high-concept YA series with a frequency so alarming, she brought it up to her therapist. What if I don’t have any other stories? she had asked, all the while wondering (stupidly, embarrassingly), Who am I, if not a successful writer?
Suraya smiles. “My youngest just started kindergarten last year. She was so excited, and then she spent the entire first day crying for us to pick her up because she didn’t like the other kids.”
“That won’t happen to me,” Helen promises.
“Of course it won’t. That wasn’t a metaphor; we’re just talking about my kids now,” Suraya laughs.
“Oh.” Helen is slightly embarrassed.
“Occupational hazard,” Suraya says. “We overshare and mine our personal lives for work, and inevitably some useless information ends up on the table and you’ll walk around LA for the next decade knowing some random detail about someone else’s kids.”
“Haha,” Helen says, like an idiot.
“You’ll get used to it.” Suraya lightly taps Helen’s shoulder. “Oh, if you look up there, it’s George Clooney’s house.”
Grant changes his shirt three times before the dinner and feels stupid every time he does it.
He finally lands on a plain black T-shirt under a varsity crew jacket he bought at the Melrose flea market a few years ago with an ex-girlfriend. He never rowed crew in high school or college, but Karina had assured him that didn’t actually matter. “It’ll look cool when you wear it on set.” And it did. She never steered him wrong in wardrobe, at least.
He’s spent the last week and a half debating if he should reach out to Helen before the writers room starts, then puts it off until it’s too late and he’s in an Uber en route to a seafood restaurant on the west side wondering if the varsity jacket was a mistake.
Maybe this whole thing was a mistake, but it’s too late to back down now.
When he gets to the reserved table and Helen isn’t there, he feels a gnawing sense of dread instead of relief. Something’s going to happen—he can feel the cosmic scales tipping against him—and he’d rather get it over with.
“Good, you’re finally here,” Suraya says, a mini–crab cake in hand. “Everyone, this is Grant, my number two.”
It’s a roll call of the usual suspects, Soapy Teen Drama Writers Room? edition—the husband-and-wife writing team, the smart-funny-mean twentysomethings, and the mini-Suraya (her name is Saskia) who clearly reminds the showrunner of herself twenty years ago.
Suraya glances up and beams. “And here’s our guest of honor, Helen Zhang.”
The table cheers rowdily and Grant looks up.
It’s her.
Helen Zhang, in the present tense. She looks—good. Her hair is swept back in a messy knot, the dark blue knit dress she’s wearing flashes a hint of light blue pleating with every step that brings her closer. She looks intimidating, put-together, and grown up and he suddenly feels inadequately prepared in every way for this moment.
Helen smiles tentatively as she looks around the table and her eyes drift past him conveniently—he can’t tell if this is on purpose or if she simply hasn’t registered him.
“Helen, we’ve got Tom, Eve, Owen, Saskia, Nicole, and Grant.”
Helen’s gaze snaps to Grant immediately and he feels like an insect pinned to paper.
“We’ve met,” she says neatly. There’s a sharpness to her voice that suddenly calls to mind an image of dispassionate scissors, cleanly snipping away any thread of destiny that has the gall to show up right now. “Grant and I went to high school together.”
She had noticed him immediately, standing next to Suraya like a cosmic joke. He still towers over everyone else in the room, though Grant Shepard’s build has leaned out since his high school football days. Is he wearing a letterman jacket? For a wild moment, Helen wonders if this is some kind of messed-up prank.
The showrunner’s brows lift and she throws Grant (Grant!) a bemused look. “You never mentioned that in your interview.”
Grant shucks the jacket off and sips his water in an obvious bid for time. He watches her over the rim of his glass. She’s perversely fascinated by what he could possibly say next and stares at the muscles of his throat (when’s the last time she thought about Grant Shepard’s throat?) working in anticipation. Finally, he swallows and sets the glass down lightly.
“Didn’t feel like a fair thing to do. The school in the books is nothing like the school we went to,” Grant says casually, his gaze flitting away from hers like it was never anything important. “Besides, I wanted to get the job because of how much you believed in me as a writer, Suraya.”
“Kiss-ass.” Suraya rolls her eyes. “He’s the number two,” she adds to Helen. “If I’m not in the room, Grant’s in charge of running things in the writers room.”