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.
“I like everything,” he says instead, and picks up a beignet. She plucks up another one and clinks it against his in a whimsical move.
“Cheers,” she says, then pops it in her mouth and moans slightly. “Fuck, that’s good.”
He catalogues this moan as a new one, and picks out another beignet.
“What’d you talk about on your date?” he asks casually.
Helen looks up as she licks cinnamon-sugar from her fingers. She stretches out a smooth bare leg until it lands on his lap. His left hand slips down to squeeze her shin.
“The usual stuff,” she says. “Where are you from, what do you do for fun, where do you see yourself in the future.”
“Hm,” Grant says, massaging her calf. “Did you kiss him?”
“I don’t usually kiss on a first date,” she says, leaning back and dropping a second leg in his lap. She closes her eyes as she murmurs, “That feels good.”
Grant swallows. He pushes her legs off of him and stands. Helen opens her eyes and blinks up at him, looking like a cat who just got shoved to the floor from a perfectly acceptable lap.
“What?” she asks.
He frowns. “Nothing.”
She tilts her head. “You’re annoyed with me.”
“You kept me waiting,” he mutters, glancing at a clock. “Maybe I want to go to sleep.”
“Do you want me to leave?” she asks.
He lets out a short, dismissive breath. He grips the back of the chair, because his hands can’t be trusted around her. He has the terrible feeling that he’s played almost every card he has, and she’s barely even started.
“Why did you come?” he asks finally.
“I wanted to see where you lived,” Helen says. “I wasn’t sure when I’d get another invitation.”
Helen holds her breath, waiting for him to kick her out. She wouldn’t blame him—it’s late, and she’s committed the terrible sin of showing up to a meeting without first knowing what she wants from it. Suraya had warned her early on to always have an agenda in mind (“otherwise, it’s a waste of everyone’s time, and yes, they’ll remember”).
Why did you come? She hadn’t expected him to ask her so directly, not when she hadn’t even asked herself the question yet. Honesty seemed like the best move, but as she watches a muscle tick in his jaw, she thinks maybe it’s time to excuse herself and flee before the humiliation of him sending her away becomes inevitable.
Instead, he says, “Let’s play a game.”
This is how she finds herself sitting on an ottoman across from Grant on the couch, playing Connect 4 on his coffee table.
“I used to play this game in the basement of a church in Westfield,” she says as they build the frame of the grid, slotting polished wooden parts against each other because it’s a nice, adult version of Connect 4, just like everything else in his house feels like a quietly decadent combination of nice and adult. “My parents were always the last ones to pick me up from summer camp, and the nuns who ran the aftercare program only had three games—chess, checkers, and Connect 4.”
“I never got to go to a real summer camp,” he says, sorting the red and black chips out. “I was always in some kind of forced football training regime.”
“It wasn’t what I hoped it’d be, if that helps,” she says. “I always imagined camp being cabins in the woods, canoes, and crushes. This was more like school if the classes were all electives. I took pottery and band and a poetry workshop.”
Grant lifts a brow. “So there are poems, is what I’m hearing.”
“Pretty sure I burned them all,” Helen answers, then grabs her portion of red chips and drops one into the left side of the grid. “Your turn.”
Grant frowns at the game. “I wrote some poetry once. It was about you.”
She looks up at him, and he studiously drops a black chip on the opposite side.
“Liar,” she says, and drops a red chip.
“I’m serious,” he says, and she catches the ghost of a smile at the corners of his mouth as he drops a black chip. “‘All the Conversations I Want to Have with You.’ That was the title. It was a creative writing assignment, my freshman year of college. We were supposed to write poems addressed to someone we wanted to talk to, but couldn’t.”
“I don’t believe you,” she says, and drops another chip. “Can I read them?”
“No,” he says. “They’re on an old hard drive my laptop isn’t compatible with anymore.”
“I bet we could salvage them—the technology exists,” Helen muses.
“I’d rather just talk to you now,” Grant says, and her stomach does a funny flip when he looks up at her. He taps the frame. “I got this game as a wrap gift. They had a whole thing with Connect 4 on this show I worked on and they gave all the writers customized Connect 4 sets after production.”
Helen picks up one of her red chips and inspects it.
“The Guys,” she reads, and drops her chip to block his.
“It was my first big show as the number two,” he says, and drops another black chip nearby.
“Like you are on our show.”
“Kind of,” he says. He blocks a run of three of her red chips with a decisive drop, and she doesn’t think she’s ever been so attracted to someone while playing Connect 4. “It’s different on every show. That one was created by these two brothers, Dan and Chris. Good guys, good writers too. But I don’t think they were very good at handling the politics behind the scenes, and we got canceled pretty quick. Paid for the down payment on this house, though.”
“Would you ever want to do your own show?”
Grant laughs. “Sure, that’s the dream, isn’t it?”
“Why don’t you?” Helen drops her chip near the middle.
“It’s not that easy convincing people with power and too much to lose to trust you with millions of dollars and years of their lives,” he says, and drops his chip to the right of hers. Then, with a flash of humor in his eyes, he adds, “Congrats on getting them to do it on your first try, by the way.”
She tries not to preen at the compliment and studies the board.
Grant shuffles his remaining chips. “Anyway, I don’t mind helping other people realize their visions. Maybe I’m better at it than coming up with my own.”
Helen drops a chip to the right, and he immediately counters it.
“I think you’d be good at the top job,” Helen says. “When you run the room for Suraya, we get more done.”
She drops a chip, and he drops his own immediately on top of hers. He reaches out and taps a diagonal pattern of black chips with his index finger—one, two, three, four.
“Ah,” Helen says. “I guess that means I lose.”
Grant lifts a brow. “What do I win?”
There’s a bitter twist to his smile, and she wonders what he thinks she’s trying to do here. She has the distinct impression that he believes she’s in control of this—whatever it is that’s come up between them. And she feels more like a pilot realizing miles after takeoff that the navigation system is on the fritz and they’re flying into a storm.
Helen suddenly wants nothing more than to wipe that too-knowing, slightly sad smirk from his face.
She stands and walks around the coffee table. He watches as she places one knee on the couch cushion next to him, testing her weight, before she straddles him and settles into his lap. His hands rest at his sides, deceptively still while his heart beats rapidly against her palms on his chest.
She leans in to press a slow kiss to his earlobe—fair play, he did the same in his office.
She feels him inhale sharply at the contact.
Helen turns her head to brush her nose against his. His lips barely brush by and she imagines she can feel the shifting of the molecules in the air between them. She lingers there, daring herself, daring him. He makes a strained sound at the back of his throat.
“Don’t . . . tease me,” he says.
“I thought you liked when I tease you,” she says.
He laughs shortly and his eyes flit to her lips.
“I can only take so much, Helen,” he murmurs. “I’m just a man.”
The gravelly need in his voice does something to her insides and she leans forward, giving him a quick, impulsive kiss on the lips. His lips are soft and warm and gone—she pulls back before he almost catches hers again. He exhales slowly and looks up into her eyes. She wonders if he sees what she’s seeing in his—darkness so inviting, she wants to dive in.
Then in a swift motion, he captures her by the wrist and pulls her down for a second kiss—her eyelids flutter shut and she falls into the sensation of being thoroughly, deeply kissed. She feels like she’s sinking and evaporating at the same time. It’s slow and drugging and when she starts to retreat, Grant makes an insistent noise as he chases her lips. You don’t get to run this time.
His tongue pushes into her mouth and she whimpers as she remembers what that tongue did in his office. She answers his implied challenge and shifts in his lap, and his bottom lip falls away in a gasp. She nips lightly at his lower lip and he laughs, then he cups her face with his hands and kisses her slowly, persuasively, as if they have all the time in the world—before he slows down the kiss that she’s already starting to call the best damn kiss of her entire life and it retreats from present tense into memory.
Her breaths are coming out in short puffs as he pulls back, his face flushed with exertion, a familiar hardness pressing into her from below.
“You’re killing me,” he says finally, and his hands run down her shoulders to her hips to her shins, roaming, kneading, squeezing along their path.
“Maybe that’s the end game,” she says.
Grant lets out a short “ha” of air, then looks up at her.
He brushes a stray piece of hair from her face and tucks it behind her ear, and she remembers the heat of the scotch she drank that night in Kevin Palermo’s kitchen, the way it traveled a warming path from her mouth to her insides. Grant pulls her back to the present with a slow, insistent back and forth brush of his thumb on her Achilles.
“Serious question,” he says. “Is there an end game?”
Helen huffs and bends to kiss him. The end game is to kiss him as many times as possible. He submits to one, two, three—ha, almost four—kisses, then pulls back. “Helen?”
She suddenly feels very exposed. She swallows, studying the micro-movements of his face. Her hands itch to unfurrow his brow and smooth out the tension around his grim mouth. But she keeps them fisted at the neck of his T-shirt, as if they’ll help her hold on to him better this way.
“I don’t know,” she says. “Does there have to be?”
He draws slow circles on the backs of her thighs, and she feels like she’s sleepwalking off a cliff.
“I don’t like surprises,” he says. “If you have a destination or an expiration date in mind, I’d rather know now.”
Expiration date. Like they’re bread, or the watery Greek yogurt she has in the back of her fridge. Helen taps an index finger against his lips, shushing the thought.
He presses a slow kiss to her finger, and there’s something warm in his gaze she can’t quite bear.
“I can’t think when you’re touching me like this,” she murmurs, her eyes closing.
“Hm,” he says. “I know what you mean.”
She leans down and kisses him again, this time with an urgency that he matches, his grip going from featherlight to viselike in an instant. It’s a searching chase of a kiss, it’s a kiss that knows they don’t have world enough, or time, for all the ways they want to lay claim to each other, at least not tonight. Somewhere, in the darkened corridors of her mind, she thinks it might be fun to play this kissing game with Grant forever, changing tempos and rules until they’ve circled back to that first, perfect kiss. When he pulls away, she’s the one who falls forward slightly, and she’s annoyed by how quickly she’s learned to chase after the feeling of his lips on hers. He laughs gently.
“Let me know if you figure it out,” he exhales. “I’d like a fighting chance of survival.”
Helen is staring at a spot in the hollow of his clavicle, stroking the inch of skin there with a single-minded frown of concentration on her face. He swallows, and her eyes flicker at the movement it causes.
“Helen,” Grant says, trying to get her attention again.
“Hm,” she answers, her hand coming up to examine his stubble.
“Why did you leave, after you asked to sleep over that night in New Jersey?”
She stops stroking his skin and her frown is now directed at him. Well, he’s used to that. He feels a sincere need to reach up to smooth out the crease of her brow.
“I thought if I stayed, I’d do something very . . . foolish.”
He laughs at that. Foolish. She’s so proper, even at a time like this. He tightens his grip on her waist, and in one smooth motion, he flips them over horizontally onto the couch. She’s flush under him now, and her mouth is a perfect, surprised O. Some primal part of him is briefly satisfied. So this is what it’s like to have her body under him.
“Helen . . .” he says, pressing his unmistakable erection against her thigh. “We aren’t going to have sex tonight. I’m not in the mood.”
She laughs as he drops his face to her neck, so she doesn’t see just how badly he wants to fuck her into the next weekend.
“Can you sleep over now?” he asks her neck.
“Hm,” she says. Half an eternity seems to pass before she says, “I have nothing to wear, though.”
He lifts his head. “You’re a fucking evil woman, you know that?”
She cackles, and he rolls off the couch before he does something . . . foolish.
“I’ll give you a shirt,” he manages as he walks off into his bedroom.
He gives her a soft, heather-gray T-shirt that she’s pretty sure she’s seen him wear before while sitting across the table from her, and a pair of boxer shorts she’s grateful for because her lace panties have been soaked through to an embarrassing extent. He leaves her the privacy of his bedroom to change, which she thinks is a polite and wise gesture until she realizes she’s been left alone in his bedroom.
His bedroom that he sleeps in. Probably has had sex in. Probably, if she’s honest, will have sex with her in, because they’ve driven so far past the city limits of a matter of time that it’s laughable. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she reminds herself that this morning, she was determined to let that ball in her court bounce until it was lost and forgotten. And then . . .
He knocks on the door before he enters and she feels like a mirrored reflection of their past selves in his office. His eyes sweep over her, from the loose fit of his shirt on her to the barest sliver of his boxers peeking out beneath the gray fabric. He swallows hard, and she realizes her nipples have turned to pinpricks under his shirt.
“Grant?”
“Hm?”
“You knocked.”
“Jesus Christ,” he says, and laughs at himself. “Yeah. I have a spare toothbrush for you. If you want it.”
There’s a strange sort of intimacy she feels brushing her teeth side by side with Grant, though he’s still fully clothed and she’s wearing his clothes. It feels like they’re laughing at some private joke as they stare at each other in the bathroom mirror and brush.
“What?” she asks, when her mouth is clear.
“Nothing,” he says. “You look good in my clothes.”
She goes back to the bedroom first, tucking her knees up as she waits for him. When he returns, he has a spare pillow and throw blanket under his arm.
“You’ll be fine on the couch, right? There’s only one bed and it is mine, so . . .”
She chucks a pillow at his head.
He ducks it and laughs. “Sorry. Couldn’t resist,” he says.
The laughter in his eyes diminishes with each step he takes toward the bed, and by the time he reaches the edge of the bed, she’s kneeling up and waiting for him to get close enough to drop her arms around his neck.
“You’re staying here, then,” he says, when they finally reach each other, and it feels like a question.
She pulls at his shirt in response, and he lifts his arms so she can pull it off him.
Ah. Grant Shepard’s solid chest, in the flesh. Her hands return lightly to his shoulders and one adventurous finger drifts slowly down to explore the ridges of what looks like must have been hard work. She’s never been much fascinated by men’s built, naked torsos—she’s always preferred a certain bundled-up cozy sweater vibe that makes her feel like she’s living inside a men’s J.Crew catalogue. But as she feels every hard muscle of Grant Shepard’s perfect chest expand and contract to her touch, she thinks maybe that’s just because she never thought she’d encounter a body like his in the flesh, when she had permission to touch and explore and, as his labored breathing suggests, titillate.
She thinks vaguely she must have seen him shirtless before, running and passing her in gym class, maybe, and wants to shout back at herself, across the void, “Run faster!”
“How does something like this even happen?” she asks, as her hand runs down his abdomen, and he laughs.
“Working out clears my head,” he says. “Sometimes I think too much.”
She wants to lick every inch of him until he doesn’t have a thought left in his brain.
He must see some trace of it on her expression, because he swallows hard, then watches her face for a reaction as he lowers his hands to unbutton his jeans. Helen inhales, then turns around sharply. She hears his chuckle and the soft thwump of fabric hitting the floor.
“I’m trying to be polite,” she says. “Stop laughing at me.”
She hears drawers opening and shutting, then feels the mattress dip below her and the warm weight of his knee on the bed. She turns around and he’s wearing sweatpants. He settles so that they’re sitting up facing each other and hooks one leg behind her, pushing her closer into the frame of his body.
Suddenly the cold January air vanishes into radiating heat and she feels like a dumb bunny caught in a trap.
He brings up a hand to her hair, and his thumb brushes her temple.
“Sometimes,” he says softly, “I think you’re afraid of me. But you always have the upper hand.”
She doesn’t feel like that’s true at all. In the entire history of their knowing each other, he’s been the one everyone listens to, the one who seems to be comfortable everywhere she feels out of place. The one who can see right through her, all these years later.
If she had the upper hand, she’d have answers for his too-honest questions that continue pinging back and forth through her bones. Why did you come? She still isn’t sure, but she’s starting to forget it was ever an option not to.
“I’m not . . . I’m not trying to date anyone for real right now,” she says, in a rush. “Not when I’m going back to New York in a couple months.”
Grant makes a slight “hm” sound as he tucks her hair behind her ear. “So Greg the casting director wasn’t real, then.”
She feels certain he can see the rapid tattoo of her pulse trying to fly through her skin.
“Just a way to pass the time,” she agrees. “I thought I could use a distraction.”
“I could distract you,” Grant murmurs, as his knuckles run down her arms. “What do you need a distraction from?”
“I, um,” Helen exhales. “I can’t remember.”
“See,” he teases, and his words bring him tantalizingly closer, but not close enough. “It’s already working.”
She’s about to close the gap between them but Grant looks down instead and lets out an amused “huh” when he sees his address scrawled on her inner thigh.
“Sorry about that,” he says, his thumb brushing her flesh. “Went a little caveman there.”
“I didn’t mind it so much,” she murmurs, and the corner of his mouth kicks up.
“So.” His eyes flit to her lips and she licks them in anticipation. He swallows. “Wanna watch this forty-five-minute cabinet-building tutorial with me?”
As it turns out, woodworking tutorials on YouTube are a very cozy way to spend a Friday night. She sits beside him, not quite touching, as he explains the inside jokes being dropped by the dry-humored, grandfatherly woodworker on the screen.
“Ha,” she laughs, feeling sleep tugging at her senses as she sinks down into the pillow. “Never show me these videos again, please.”
Grant chuckles. “Okay,” he says, and captures her chin to brush a quick kiss to her mouth. “I’ll put in headphones.”
Some warm, unfamiliar feeling floods her chest, and she pushes it down as she nudges her way onto his shoulder, his right arm curving around her as his left reaches for the headphones on his nightstand.
She watches him watch the video for a while, one earbud trailing onto his chest, and she thinks of their time together on the plane, when he looked younger and less invincible, watching Babe. She thinks perhaps this is the only angle from which to catch a glimpse of this version of Grant, slightly off to the side and looking up toward him. It might be her favorite view of him.
“It’s a pretty good view for me too,” he says, and slowly she realizes she must have said it out loud before drifting off to sleep.