How to End a Love Story(60)

“There you go again,” he murmurs, tracing her cheek with his knuckle. “Thousand-yard stare while I’m right in front of you.”

“It’s just . . .” She pauses, and leans into his touch. He’s so good at touching her, she thinks she might miss this forever. “Brain goes vroom vroom. But I’m still here.”

The corner of his mouth turns up at this. “I know. That brain of yours never stops, does it?”

“I think maybe it did for a second there, just now.”

He laughs (she likes being responsible for it), then studies her. “What are you doing today?”

She shrugs.

“I need to get a coatrack,” he says out of nowhere. “Come with me.”





Nineteen




The place he wants to buy a coatrack from, as it turns out, is an antiques market that runs every weekend out of a retired airport hangar in Santa Monica (about twenty minutes from her condo). It gives her an excuse to leave as he heads into the shower, so she can go home to her own shower and bath products and makeup and oh god, her hair probably looks like a rat’s nest.

She texts him her address before she has time to overthink it and gets on the road.

She passes at least two other flea markets during her long drive back home and wonders why he suddenly wants a coatrack.

When Helen opens the door to her apartment, she’s slightly surprised to find everything exactly as she left it yesterday morning. The same marble countertops, the same beige furniture, the same generic art on her walls. She thinks of how worried her mother was about earthquakes in this city and wonders if emotional earthquakes have the same kind of internal fallout—rattled bones, shaken foundations, everything hanging on the walls slightly askew. She wonders if he feels like this too, and what he’s thinking about right now.

Helen steps into the shower and hugs herself slowly under the hot water. The hazy steam from the humidity drifts up, fogging the glass, as she submits to the quiet, cleansing meditation of water falling down her body.

She allows herself a moment to look back and properly ruminate on the events of the past twenty-four hours.

She’s kissed Grant Shepard.

She’s slept in his bed, in his arms.

They’ve traded orgasms at least three times since that New Year’s Eve party in the basement, though she’s not so sure of the score anymore.

This won’t end well, a small voice in the back of her head reminds her. It can’t.

She isn’t kidding herself. She knows she’s lucked into something she could never possibly keep—Grant Shepard’s undivided attention. Keeping Grant in her life in any real way would be tantamount to setting fire to a tapestry she’s spent the better part of the last thirteen years carefully weaving. Her parents would never be able to understand or accept it, and every time they saw him, they’d be reliving the same old hurts she has worked extremely hard to help them heal and move on from.

So no, this battle of her base wants and old needs can’t end well.

But also, also, she’s just as sure it can’t end yet.

Not yet, she protests. Shouldn’t we get to enjoy this before we have to give it up?

She’s already enjoying it too much, perhaps.



Helen changes into jeans and a white button-up and she has just enough time to blow-dry her hair when her phone vibrates with a text—it’s ridiculous, the buzzing thrill that shoots through her when she sees his name on the screen.

I’m here.

When she opens the door, she sees him before he notices her—he’s leaning against a parking sign, wearing sunglasses and a navy hoodie she remembers seeing hanging in his closet. He scrolls through his phone, and she’s tempted to snap a photo of him like this—some evidence of him waiting for her, something she can look back on as proof it all happened when she’s old and gray.

He looks up just then, and it’s like the sun comes out only to highlight Grant Shepard’s smile. He looks like he belongs in a movie and she self-consciously plays with the strap of her purse as she approaches. He stands up a little straighter as she gets closer and puts his phone away.

He reaches out a hand and pulls her in for a kiss—slow, determined, sure. She exhales slightly when he releases her, resting his forehead against hers as her pulse hums in a contented buzz.

“Just checking,” he says.

She feels a clinching sensation around her heart, as if someone’s just squeezed it.

“Are you driving?” she asks.

He nods and heads for the driver’s side of his gray convertible. She slips into the passenger seat and realizes it’s the first time she’s been inside his car in LA. She doesn’t know anything about cars, but she’s seen enough movies to know that girls like her—nice girls, girls who listen to their parents—don’t ride around town in convertibles like this.

“So,” he says, as they pull into traffic. “What do you like to do for fun?”

“I, um,” she starts, and realizes she’s nervous for some reason. “I go on long walks and listen to podcasts hosted by stand-up comedians.”

Grant chuckles softly as he makes a left turn. “Why stand-up comedians?”

“They’re good at talking to people, and I’m not,” she says. “So I like listening to them having conversations with other people. I usually listen to a podcast before my meetings, as a warm-up reminder on how to talk to people.”