How to End a Love Story(61)

“You’re not as awkward as you think you are.”

“It’s working, then,” she murmurs, and he laughs.

“What about you?” she asks, as he shifts gears on the car. She glances down at his hand and wonders what he’d do if she reached out to touch it.

“I play hockey sometimes,” he says. “A couple of the guys in a room I did a few years back started a league. They needed more people so I joined to have something to do.”

“Did you skate in high school?” She frowns, trying to remember.

“No,” he says. “I took classes as an adult. I was on the ice with all these little kids, like a giraffe in hockey skates.”

She tries not to think too much about Grant Shepard on the ice surrounded by children—her ovaries can’t take it.

“You’re such a team player,” she says. “Football, hockey, writing TV. What do you do when you’re alone?”

Grant glances at her and his hand catches hers idly by the wrist. His fingers slip up to entwine in hers.

“Hm,” he says. “Woodworking, if a friend has a project for me. Go to the gym. Read things my agent sends me. I don’t know. I guess I’m pretty boring on my own.”

He brings her hand up to press a quick kiss to the back of it as they stop at a traffic light. She holds her breath—he slowly brushes her thumb with his.

“I don’t think you’re boring,” she murmurs, and her heart pounds wildly in agreement.

“That’s a good sign,” he says.



The Santa Monica antiques market is a relatively small flea market. Still, Grant knows it’s a good place for people watching and talking while zigzagging up and down the stalls, each one boasting something slightly different and interesting to anyone with a romantic fascination with the past.

Helen stops at a used-books and rare art-prints stall, and spends a good deal of time talking to the older man who runs it—Yanis, a former computer programmer who quit his job in the nineties to pursue his true passion, art dealership. She walks away with a few rare bookplates and an 1800s edition of The Vicar of Wakefield, and he can tell she’s in a good mood by the way she touches his shoulder sometimes to point out some new interesting thing every few steps.

They find a few coatrack options and he soon learns that Helen haggles like it’s an Olympic sport.

“How much?” she asks. “Hm. There’s a little damage there, but it’s beautiful otherwise. Maybe we’ll come back.”

They settle on a vintage coatrack from a seller with much bigger furniture pieces to worry about. Helen talks the price down to $60, then whispers to him it would probably go for upward of $125 online. The seller winds the coatrack in shrink wrap and hands him a ticket to pick it up later. Grant leads the way back through the market to the parking lot.

“Why do you know so much about vintage furniture pricing?”

She shrugs.

“One of my author friends back home—Elyse—she furnished her entire town house going to random flea markets and estate sales,” she says. “And I became a little obsessed. We never had anything old in our house growing up; my parents always said flea markets sounded dirty.”

“Hm,” he says. “You think the East Coast will always be home?”

Helen pauses. “I’ve never really thought about living anywhere else,” she says. “Not seriously.”

“Could you see yourself staying in LA, for any reason?” he asks.

“For the show,” she says. “If it does well, maybe. I like the weather. I like being on a different coast from my parents, as terrible as that sounds. They worry about me and I don’t . . . feel it, as much, from here.”

“Did they visit you a lot, in New York?”

Helen shakes her head.

“They just kind of expected me to come home a lot, and I was close enough that it felt like they were right and I should.” She shrugs. “Anyway, the studio’s paid for my condo through the end of production in April, so I have some time to make decisions.”

He wonders if he’ll factor at all into those decisions.

“Hm,” he says out loud.

They reach the car and he brings it around to the items pickup area.

“How are you going to transport it?” Helen asks.

“Carefully,” he answers.

They hand his ticket to someone in an orange vest and wait by the entrance, resting against a parking lot barrier near the gate. He looks askance at her—her cheeks are flushed and her hair has acquired a windswept quality from walking outside for the last two hours. His heart squeezes slightly with a sudden desire to pull her closer—she’s so damn pretty—but she’s kept a respectable distance since they stepped out of the car.

He looks down to study their hands—his rests next to hers on the granite parking barrier. He nudges her pinkie slightly with his and she answers by lifting her pinkie to cover his own. Not quite holding hands in public, but—something.

“Grant Fucking Shepard! Oy!”

He turns toward the entrance and feels Helen snatch her hand away, and then the heat of her presence leaves his right side.

It’s a trio of familiar faces—Andy, a camera operator from the last show he worked on; his boyfriend Reese; and . . . Karina, wardrobe. Karina smiles at him, her eyes flitting briefly to his side.