How to End a Love Story(63)

“I kind of thought I could tell them later, after everything was over, once the episode was definitely going to air.” She laughs at herself. “I know that sounds stupid. But it’s kind of how I handle everything . . . tricky with them. Wait till the last possible minute to make sure the conversation is absolutely necessary, and then rip off the Band-Aid and move on when it’s too late for them to do anything about it.”

He brushes a stray piece of hair behind her ear patiently.

“It doesn’t sound stupid,” he says. “It sounds like you found a way to make your relationship with your parents work.”

“Yeah,” she says, and looks off, before glancing at him again. “Even if you’re not on set, you’re going to be on the call sheets as a co-EP. Maybe I can make sure they don’t see one. Everyone on set technically works for me, right?”

Grant laughs out loud. “Yeah, let’s just kick that can farther down the road.”

He ignores a twinge of this might hurt more later, somewhere under his ribs.

Helen groans. “This one time I had to pick them up from the airport to take them directly to my apartment in college, then I remembered my parents are my parents and I had to frantically text my neighbor to break into my room and clean it out of anything incriminating.”

“What was so incriminating?”

“Oh, just . . . the usual stuff. My diary. Lingerie. Sex toys.”

Grant lifts a brow and she gives an embarrassed shrug.

“Well, the difference is you’re an adult now,” Grant says, trying not to think about Helen’s lingerie and sex toy collection. “With your own apartment and your own disposable income, and your own TV show.”

“Yeah,” Helen says, nodding. She’s quiet for a moment, then looks up at him with wide-open vulnerability. “I still don’t want to hurt them, though.”

Grant feels strangely like he’s just lost something. His jaw tenses, and he nods.

“I do love my parents,” Helen says, a little haltingly. “Sometimes I think it sounds like I don’t. To people who come from other types of families. Families that know how to love each other out loud. Mine never did. None of us ever told Michelle we loved her, that’s for sure.”

Grant watches her. “Did anyone ever tell you?”

Helen looks down and lifts a shoulder. “I started saying ‘I love you’ to my parents whenever I hung up the phone in college. It always feels kind of forced and they only say it back like fifty percent of the time, but . . .”

She smiles and waves a dismissive hand, like, What can you do?

Grant waits for her to continue.

“It wasn’t like I ever missed it or anything. I used to cringe whenever people said love in books and movies,” she says. “I love you, making love, anything with love . . . it always seemed so unimaginable to me, that someone could actually say that out loud without, like, immediately dying of embarrassment.”

“What did you say instead?”

Helen shrugs. “Let’s have sex,” she says.

The stutter in Grant’s brain must be visible, and Helen stifles a laugh. “I meant that’s what I said instead.”

“Right,” he says. “Of course.”

“Anyway, I didn’t want you to think I . . . I don’t love my parents, or something,” she says quietly. “I know how to love people. I love, Helen loves, she-slash-it loves. That’s, um, a joke I had, with my best friends in New York. I was a robot, Helen-the-Machine, and she-slash-it was sometimes trying to become sentient between all her dumb achievements. It was stupid.”

Grant frowns. “Who are your best friends?”

Helen rubs her temples and shakes her head. “We don’t have to talk about them right now. They don’t really talk to me anymore, anyway. I think they’d be surprised to hear I even called them that.”

Grant studies her carefully as she looks out the window. She looks fine, like she doesn’t need whatever reassurance he suddenly feels compelled to give her. He decides to say it anyway.

“I know you’re human, Helen,” he says. “And I’m sure you know how to love people, even if you don’t say it out loud all the time.”

He’s surprised by a sudden warm grip on his right hand—she’s snuck her own hand under the coatrack to squeeze his. He looks over at her and she’s watching him with soft eyes.

“Thanks,” she says quietly.

He exhales and starts the car.

“Let’s get you home.”



It takes about forty-five minutes to drive from Helen’s condo in Santa Monica back home to his own house in Silver Lake, and Grant spends most of it running mental laps around the same track of problems.

“Do you wanna come up?” she asked him when he’d pulled up to the loading zone outside of her building. “There’s guest parking in the garage.”

She’d looked so hopeful, inviting him. He’d looked up at the building and thought about the hours he could spend there, seeing where Helen ate and slept and dreamed.

“I should get this home,” he had said instead, patting the coatrack.

It had been an act of self-preservation.

The first problem, he determines, is that he likes her. She’s smart and she’s funny and she’s sexy as hell when she wants to be. When she’s paying attention to him. When she’s not. She makes him feel like he has to be smarter and funnier and better, so she’ll let him stick around.