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.”
“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.
“Hey,” he says.
“What, we don’t hug anymore?” Karina asks as she leads their crew over, and he gives her a one-armed hug, as well as Andy and Reese.
Grant turns and finds Helen hanging back at a polite distance. “This is Helen. Helen—Andy, Reese, Karina. Andy and Karina worked on The Guys with me; they’re camera and wardrobe department. And Reese is—”
“Newly engaged,” Reese says, flashing his ring finger. “As of last week.”
“Holy shit.” Grant grins. “Congrats, you two.”
“Well, it felt like time,” Andy says.
“What a romantic.” Reese rolls his eyes.
“What do you do, Helen?” Karina asks.
“I, um, I’m a writer,” she says. “Grant and I work together.”
“That makes sense,” Karina says with a slow smile as she tilts her head. “It’s nice to meet you, Helen.”
Grant suddenly regrets everything he’s ever told Karina and the existence of ex-girlfriends, as a concept.
“We should get going, before all the good stuff gets got,” Andy says. “It’s good to see you, man.”
“You too,” he nods and waves them off.
It occurs to Grant that he doesn’t really have friends, for all his agent claims that everyone likes him. He had thought of Andy as a friend, but he’s realizing theirs was the kind of casual friendship of convenience that came from working together for months on end, twelve plus hours a day. They’re friendly now, but they’re not friends—not in the sense of keeping up with each other’s lives or going out of their way to see each other outside of work.
They had all hung out as a unit back then, Andy and Reese, Grant and Karina. But once the show ended, so did most of the things they had in common, including his relationship. He thinks this might be a character flaw of his, this ability to fall into friendships and relationships so easily, when they never seem to last once the initial trappings of what makes him temporarily relevant in people’s lives passes. He isn’t sure how to fix it.
“Did you . . .” Helen starts, looking back at them. “Never mind.”
She’s frowning and he thinks of how she looked asking about Lauren DiSantos in that basement on New Year’s Eve—like she’d been annoyed she was even bringing it up. He wants to reassure her suddenly, though of what, he’s not even sure.
“Karina and I used to date,” he says. “It wasn’t very serious.”
Helen nods. “Right.”
Someone brings over his coatrack and they manage to maneuver it into the convertible with the top down. It creates a perfect barrier between him and Helen on the drive back.
They stop for lunch at a drive-through In-N-Out and sit in the parking lot with their burgers and fries under a line of palm trees.
“I don’t get the secret menu thing,” she says as she polishes off the last of her animal-style fries. “Why make everything harder?”
“It makes people feel cooler,” he says. “Knowing things not everyone knows.”
Her phone rings then, and she freezes slightly.
“It’s my mom,” she says. “I should . . .”
She picks up and he suddenly finds himself holding his breath.
“Mom? Hi,” she says, and turns slightly away from him. “No, I’m just out to lunch with a—friend . . . yeah.”
A friend. Grant wonders what he would call Helen if his mom asked. She had lifted cool brows when he’d told her who was coming for dinner the day after Christmas, then she’d calmly asked if Helen had any dietary restrictions. The day before he flew back, she’d asked him if he would see Helen again soon. “We do work together, Mom,” he’d said. She’d given him a funny look and said, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
Helen is speaking in a jumbled mix of English and Mandarin now—he can pick out occasional American phrases like the show and production office and the Sheraton in Santa Monica—and he wonders what he is doing.
He had left New Jersey with a single-minded determination that they weren’t done with each other yet, and he spent the days after New Year’s Eve weighing his options in case Helen might not agree. He opted for a slow and subtle approach—if he’d done anything else, it would have been too easy for her to take any scrap of evidence of disconnect (you don’t use punctuation in your texts, this is doomed) and build it into an insurmountable wall between them.
She’s sitting in his car now and there isn’t a wall between them. But there is a coatrack. And he can’t help but feel the stupid thing is a spindly little metaphor for something.
“Okay. Yes. I will. Bye.” Helen hangs up and looks over at him.
“Good phone call?” he asks.
“My parents are coming to town in a few weeks, for the start of filming,” she says. “They wanted to see the set and take pictures and brag about me to their friends.”
“Seems pretty worth bragging about to me,” Grant says.
She looks up at him, worry clouding her eyes.
“I haven’t told them you’re working on the show,” she says, a dent of concern forming between her brows that he wants to smooth and kiss away.
“No, I figured as much,” Grant says.
“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.
And that’s the second problem. He is quite, quite certain that she won’t, not in the long run. There are a million Grant Shepards in this city alone and it’s a matter of time before she meets one she likes just as much, who doesn’t come with his particular brand of personal baggage.
He isn’t sure how long he has, or how easily she’ll cut him out of her life when the time comes. Grant feels a pressure building in his chest at the thought.
As he gets the coatrack into his house, he hears a faint ringing in his ears and his vision grows spotty. He knows he’s on the verge of having a panic attack.
You should find someone you can talk to.
He thinks about what Karina told him on the phone a couple months ago. He had assumed she meant a therapist (and he does have one; he had one even back then), but maybe she meant someone more like a friend. Does Helen count as a friend? The word seems pathetically incomplete, applied to her.
He hasn’t told his therapist about Helen yet. Or rather, Helen post-Christmas. It had felt too new, too complicated, to get into during their monthly check-in.
He walks on unsteady legs to the couch and grips the back of it. He shuts his eyes and exhales. He remembers sitting on this couch last night—waiting, watching, wanting—trying not to move a muscle as Helen came toward him. Willing her closer—close enough for him to make a compelling argument for her to stay. And she did.
The ringing in his ears subsides slowly and he stands, frowning against the afternoon light.
What was he doing?
Oh right, the coatrack.
He frowns at the thing, not entirely sure why he bought it. He walks over to the closet and opens it, and he remembers. There were no hangers available last night, when Helen came over. He woke up this morning feeling like he should make some space in his life for people with long winter coats.
He frowns, staring at all the jackets and old hoodies hanging in the dim light.
Maybe, he thinks, I should just get rid of things I don’t need anymore.