How to End a Love Story(86)

“I like your tortured drama,” he says plainly.

Helen isn’t sure how much more of this she can take, but she also doesn’t want to have this conversation with him ever again. So she stays. He looks at her, and all the warm, buried emotions she’s glimpsed in his eyes before are there now, blazing quietly.

Grant tilts his head back against the wall. “Could you have loved me back, do you think? Or was it . . . always doomed?”

Helen swallows. I do, I do, I do, her heart seems to say with every beat.

“You know me,” she says softly. “Always with the doom and gloom.”

“I love you,” he says again, staring at her. The corner of his mouth lifts. “It’s kind of nice to say it out loud. Even under the circumstances.”

Helen wipes moisture from her cheeks and realizes she’s crying. In an instant, he’s next to her, pulling her into his arms, stroking her hair, and whispering soothingly to her, “It’s okay, you don’t have to say it back, it’s okay, I love you, I love you, I love you.”

She kisses him to stop the words in his mouth, but she can still feel the shape of them against her lips as he kisses her back, in his hands coming up to cup her face. She can feel it radiating from the heat of his fingertips on her cheek, in the desperate sweep of his tongue, and the insistent tattooing rhythm in her chest echoing I love you, I love you, I love you, until she’s no longer sure if it’s coming from him or her.

Grant attempts to end the kiss first, slowly, coming back for a last kiss, then another, and another, until he’s almost laughing against her mouth.

“Helen, we have to stop,” he murmurs, and kisses her nose.

“This can’t end on my nose,” she answers, and he lets out a short “ha.”

She holds him by the chin and presses a final (really) kiss against his mouth—it’s short, firm, and unbearably warm—then she stands.

He looks up at her, and she looks down at him.

“You’re leaving, then,” he says.

She nods.

“Don’t come back now, ya hear?” he says, in a terrible Jimmy Stewart drawl, humor in his eyes. The laughter dims, and he stares at her with a bleak expression of hopeless wanting. “I mean it.”

She nods again and swallows, then leaves the kitchen.

He doesn’t follow her, but he does stand and watch from the doorway of the kitchen as she gets her coat and bags. She looks back at him when she opens the door and he lifts two fingers in a half-hearted goodbye. She wishes instantly she hadn’t looked back—the image of him is too easy to memorize, and she’s already trying to forget the shape of him standing there and how easily she would fit into the crook of his neck.

“Bye,” she mutters so quietly she’s sure he can’t even hear it, and walks out the door.

She doesn’t listen to anything as she drives home and cries so much she briefly thinks it’s raining from how blurry her vision gets at a stoplight on Sawtelle Boulevard. It’s not, though, and she keeps her emotions in check long enough to get home in one piece.





Twenty-Eight




The biggest fucking joke of all is that they start prep on his episode the next morning, so Grant scrubs his face raw, puts on clothes and shoes and aftershave like it’s a normal day, and goes into work.

He stops by the production office to introduce himself to the prepping director, who he knows a little because she worked on another show he did a few years ago.

“It’s a great script,” she says with that air of friendly distraction all episodic directors seem to carry, a million plates spinning in their minds. “It’s gonna be a fun one.”

“Yeah,” he says, and laughs at himself. “It was a love letter. To the books.”

She waits for him to say something else, anything else, and he realizes he’s keeping her from her work. There are giant blueprints of all their standing sets on the walls behind her, and he’s alarmed to find them starting to swim and blur in his field of vision. He rubs his eyes and clears his throat.

“There’s, um, a thing at the top of the third act, that’s setting up something later in the season, not sure if it’s obvious, but I’m sure it’ll come up at the tone meeting,” he says, mostly for something to say.

“Great.” She nods. “I’ll keep an eye out for it, then.”

“Great,” he says stupidly, and walks away.

He spends the rest of the morning reading through incoming notes from Suraya about revisions on Owen’s script that she doesn’t have time to do, so could he please take care of them, and Saskia’s new draft, and emails from his agent sending him books for his consideration to adapt, because apparently working on The Ivy Papers has proven he can work around intellectual property and that opens a whole new world of doors.

He doesn’t go to set with the director for her initial walk-through of their soundstages, because he isn’t sure if Helen’s parents will still be there. Helen herself almost certainly will and he can’t tell if that makes the decision harder or easier. He tries not to search for her every time he looks out his window at the studio lot below, and is irritated by the fact that he’s a little devastated every time she’s not there.

He’s partially relieved when Suraya swings by his office at lunch to tell him she doesn’t need him to cover his own episode on set, that she’d rather have him take charge of the closing weeks of the writers room.