How to End a Love Story(54)

“Sure,” she says, and suddenly he’s next to her, adjusting her stance and touching her arm. She tries not to think about the blue ink that seems to be burning an address-shaped hole into her inner right thigh.

“Just pull your hand back and . . . release,” he says, stepping back an appropriate distance to watch her go. He’s so appropriate, Helen thinks.

They watch her ball roll into the gutter, and they both laugh.

“I told you I didn’t actually know what I was doing,” Greg says.



1847 Rotary Drive.

It’s dark by the time Helen drives past the Silver Lake Reservoir and turns onto one of the winding streets nearby. The streets are cramped, and she tells herself that if she can’t find parking, she’ll make a U-turn at the top of the hill and drive straight home and never mention this part of the night to anyone.

But there’s a spot right out front next to the driveway, and she pulls into it easily, her heart pounding.

1847 Rotary Drive is a light yellow, Spanish-style bungalow covered with bougainvillea, and a warmly colored porch light is on when she walks up and rings the doorbell.





Seventeen




Grant opens the door to find Helen standing on his porch, holding a brown takeaway bag.

He crosses his arms and leans against the door frame, inspecting the details of her. She’s smiling, a little nervously, but smiling nonetheless. She’s thrown on a winter coat over the familiar yellow dress underneath, maybe because January desert temperatures quickly run from hot to freezing after the sun sets. She looks buttoned-up and proper. She came on his tongue a few hours ago.

“How was your date?” he asks.

“Fine,” she says. “Good.”

His jaw tenses and he tries not to think too much about what good means.

“Think you’ll see him again?”

Helen tilts her head, considering the question. He wonders what calculations are happening in her sharp, beautiful brain right now.

“I don’t think so,” she says softly. “No.”

“Hm.”

She smiles slightly and his chest feels tight. He wants to touch her again. But she already knows that.

“I brought dessert,” she says, holding up the bag. Then, a little more uncertainly—“Can I come in?”

He stares at the woman on his porch, whose hidden layers he’s just starting to unravel, and he gets a sharp, strange sensation in the back of his lizard brain that he might be in some danger here, which is ridiculous. After briefly considering sending her home—ha—he nods gruffly and leans back to let her pass.

She looks around his living room with naked curiosity as he takes her coat from her.

Seeing her existing in the familiar space transforms it—he’s grateful he listened to the real estate agent who suggested custom wood blinds instead of cheap ones from Target, and whether or not his couch is worth keeping suddenly seems to hinge a lot on the next few hours. He thinks he might be losing his mind.

He doesn’t have enough hangers in the nearest closet, so he throws her coat on top of one of his.

“Do you want anything?” he asks as he moves into the kitchen.

“Tea, if you have it,” she murmurs.

She’s running her hands across his wood dining table now, and an image of her palms pressed into the wood while he presses into her flashes across his brain.

Tea.

She’s flipping through his mail when he returns with a mug of chamomile.

“You get a lot of mail,” she says.

“Most of it’s junk.”

“A lot of DVDs.” She holds up a few screeners for some Oscar hopefuls of last year.

“You’re welcome to any of those,” he says, ignoring the bubbling thought that she’s welcome to anything in his house that she wants. He flips the floor lamp on and retreats to the kitchen to get plates.

“I’m impressed you have so much framed art on the walls,” she says, her voice carrying from the dining room to the kitchen. “I still have things I need to hang back in New York.”

She’s studying his gallery wall of framed paraphernalia—a cast-signed copy of his first produced episodic script, a screenshot of his first on-screen writing credit, behind-the-scenes photos, posters for old movies.

“I can make you a frame if you need one,” he says. “I made probably half of those.”

“That’s so impressive,” she says, and he’s slightly embarrassed by how much he likes hearing her say impressive.

“I started watching woodworking tutorials to fall asleep a few years ago. Frames are easy; it’s the glass that’s tricky.”

She’s silent for a while and he turns his attention to the dessert she brought—cinnamon-dusted dough balls. He tries not to think about whether Greg the casting director is at home with his own portion of the same dessert and warms them up before setting them out next to a dipping bowl of sauce. He sits at the head of the table, and after a quick scan of the seats, she takes the chair nearest to him.

“I stopped at a beignet food truck on the way here,” she says. “Didn’t want to show up empty-handed. But I wasn’t sure what you like.”

He swallows at this.

He’d happily spend hours telling her his likes and dislikes and cataloguing hers in return, but he has the distinct impression that isn’t what she wants from him.