Twenty
Helen hosts a single-girls-only sleepover at her condo the following Friday.
“I was gonna make fun of you for moving to the west side like every other East Coast transplant, but this . . .” Nicole throws open the windows to gaze adoringly at the perfectly framed Santa Monica Pier, lit up like a carnival at night in the distance. “This is worth it.”
“Where’s your wine opener?” Saskia asks, opening and closing drawers in the kitchen.
Helen isn’t enough of a wine drinker to own one in a temporary apartment, and they have to watch a YouTube tutorial on how to uncork a bottle using car keys and a pen.
They put on Cruel Intentions because Saskia’s never seen it, and halfway through explaining just how truly iconic the cast is, including platinum-blond Joshua Jackson (“You mean Jodie Turner-Smith’s husband?”), Nicole pauses the movie.
“Okay, we aren’t watching another second of this movie until Helen agrees to tell us about her date.”
Monday had been an embarrassment of attention from everyone in the room. They were all too invested in her survey-form date. Grant had been there when it came up—he’d popped in to join them for lunch, taking his usual seat across from Helen, and he’d loudly pulled the tab of a Coke Zero as Nicole demanded date details.
“It was fun,” Helen told them. “We bowled.”
Owen called her a story tease and Saskia wanted to know if he gave her butterflies and Grant asked her to pass him a mint.
Ultimately, Helen told them she wasn’t going to see Greg the casting director again, to the great disappointment of Eve and Saskia.
“But why?” Nicole had demanded.
Then Suraya had started looking at the glass dry-erase board in the way Suraya did when she felt like lunchtime conversations were going on too long, and Helen cut off the chatter with a promise to tell them later. Grant left for his office and she had slipped out to use the restroom before they started their afternoon session of breaking episode four.
She made it two steps before Grant’s hand reached out, and suddenly she found herself pinned against the wall behind the writers room and thoroughly, extremely kissed.
“Come over tonight,” he’d said, his voice low and vibrating in a way that made her want to press against him harder and again and more.
“No,” she’d told him. “I don’t have clothes.”
“I’ll buy you new clothes,” he’d said, nipping at her lower lip.
“Go write a good script,” she’d answered, “and maybe then I’ll come over.”
She slipped away from him then, willing herself not to turn around when she heard his low chuckle behind her.
She’s proud of herself for sticking to it—for the most part, a few daily detours to his office purely to check in on the status of his writing notwithstanding.
On Thursday afternoon, her inbox chimed with an email from Grant.
(No subject)
Come over.
Attachment: The Ivy Papers—Episode 102—Grant Shepard—Draft 1.pdf
She had flushed so noticeably, Nicole asked her what was happening on her phone. She had been too flustered to think of a better lie and said, “I think I have a date this weekend.”
They had been treated to a heavy this doesn’t sound relevant to breaking the story sigh from Suraya, and Nicole had extracted a promise from Helen to make good on her earlier promise to share all date-related gossip. They settled on a Friday-night sleepover, which Helen figured would buy her some time to figure out what, exactly, coming over would entail.
“Helen,” Saskia whines now, wineglass in hand. “I thought we were friends. Why are you being so cagey about this?”
Helen ducks her head and tries to grab the remote from Nicole.
“Because she’s relishing in the fact that she has gossip,” Nicole answers, shoving the remote under her shirt. “Stop being a cunt and tell us what the deal is with your date. Is it with Greg?”
“No, I told you I wasn’t seeing him again,” Helen says. “It’s . . . I don’t know. A weird new thing.”
Nicole eyes her shrewdly.
“Why is it weird?” Saskia asks.
“Um,” Helen says.
“Is it someone we know?” Nicole asks, her eyes narrowing.
“I—”
“Holy shit, you’re fucking Grant,” Nicole says.
Helen turns beet red, which doesn’t help her case as she denies, “No, no, no. I’m not. We’re not fucking.”
“But you want to!” Nicole says, and smacks Helen with a throw pillow. “Bitch, I fucking knew it!”
Saskia looks between them, her mouth agape. “No . . . no, really?”
Helen drops her head into the throw pillow in Nicole’s lap and lets out a muffled groan. “It’s . . . complicated.”
“Yeah, I bet,” Nicole says, patting her hair. “When you bang, is he the one in charge, because he’s Suraya’s number two? Or are you, because it’s your books and therefore your show?”
Helen snorts at this.
“How did it start?” Saskia asks, sounding a little awed.
“I don’t know,” Helen says. “We went home for winter break and it was . . . different.”
“Hot,” Nicole offers supportively.
“But now we’re back here, and it’s . . . I don’t know.” She flips up and stares at the ceiling, as if she’s lying on her therapist’s couch. “It’s like the whole time we were in New Jersey, we were in this twilight zone of not the past and not the present. Nothing felt real—maybe that’s why it was even . . . possible. Ever since we’ve come back to LA, it’s felt like . . . like there could be real consequences.”
“Consequences like what?” Saskia prompts.
Helen considers. Probably something like—liking him too much to walk away at a sensible time and getting stupidly attached and forcing herself into an entirely avoidable, impossible situation.
“I don’t know, I’m just talking absolute shit,” Helen mutters. “It might not even be a date. His email just said, ‘Come over.’”
Nicole snorts. “Yeah, he means on his dick.”
“I would like to do that,” Helen says with an air of tragic resignation, and Nicole and Saskia burst into laughter. She feels a giddy, unexpected sensation of relief then—as if sharing this secret has somehow made it easier to bear, though she knows none of the vital facts have changed.
“What you need is a good, old-fashioned terms-of-services agreement,” Nicole says at last. “That way, everything stays aboveboard and everyone’s on the same page. Extremely vital in any situationship. The earlier you talk it out, the better.”
It makes enough sense that Helen texts him shortly before midnight—
If I come over tomorrow, can we talk terms of service first?
The response is almost immediate—
What services are you interested in?
She flushes, thinking of him awake in his bed, waiting for a response from her. She debates the pros and cons of a teasing versus a serious answer, but a second message comes from him first—
See you in the a.m.
Grant opens the door before she has a chance to knock.
It’s Saturday morning and he’s still wearing sweatpants, an old T-shirt, and a sleepy kind of expression as he combs a hand through the tousled mess of his hair. He leans against the doorway idly, and suddenly she wants to plant herself face-first into his chest, so she can hear the rumble of his laugh as she rises and falls with his breathing.
But that would be an insane thing to do, so instead she nudges his slippered foot with her sneaker.
“Fuck, you look good in yoga pants,” he says finally, and pulls her inside the door as she laughs.
“I haven’t read the script,” she murmurs, between kisses that taste like peppermint toothpaste.
“Who cares,” he says, burying his face in her neck.
“Grant.” She tries to bring his head back up but succeeds only in tangling her fingers in his hair instead.
“Who decided on a five-day workweek?” he says, kissing his way down to her collarbone. “Let me go back in time and murder them.”
“I missed you too,” she exhales, and after a brief pause, he rewards her with a bruising, hard kiss on her mouth as he pulls her into his body.
Her hands slip under his T-shirt to rake nails down his chest, and she feels the vibration of his growl of approval.
“We should talk about—this,” she murmurs against his mouth.
“Stop kissing me, then,” he answers, impossibly.
She slides a hand from the back of his neck to smooth down the front of his T-shirt, finally separating them. From the lips, anyway—he drops his forehead to hers and fiddles with the bottom of her cropped sweatshirt.
“I’m worried,” she starts, then stops as she feels his other thumb brush across the pulse point at her neck. “I’m worried we might be starting something that could end . . . badly.”
“Hm,” he says, and brushes his thumb slowly back and forth on that one spot. “Go on.”
“I think maybe we should talk about some . . . ground rules.”
“Ground rules.” He nods against her forehead.
“I don’t want it to affect our work. Maybe it is already.”
“But how would you know if you didn’t read my script?” he teases her, and his lips seem to bait her closer.
“I was going to,” she murmurs, and it feels like her pulse is beating faster just to chase the feel of his skin. “But I don’t have a printer.”
“Hm.” He smooths his thumb over that one spot, then presses a quick kiss to the corner of her mouth. “Fine. Let’s go.”
She frowns as the warm heat of his hands and body retreat from her. “What?”
He walks away from her down the hallway, into his bedroom.
“Let’s go to the office,” he says from the other room. “We can talk about how this will or won’t affect our work there. I just have to put on some clothes.”
“But . . .” She walks a few steps and stops outside his bedroom door. He’s in his boxer briefs, and he lifts a brow at her appearance.
“Helen,” he says firmly. “If you come in here, I’m gonna fuck you on my bed until you forget your name, my name, and whatever very smart and important questions you have brewing in that beautiful head of yours because you can’t think straight from how many times I’ve made you come. So if you don’t want that, you should stay . . . put.”
“Oh,” she says softly, and falls back against the wall. “Okay.”
He laughs, and shuts the door in her face.
They don’t talk much in the car as Grant drives them to the studio lot. She’s entirely too aware of him, and though he isn’t touching her, she feels her cheeks flush every time he glances in her direction. The weekend security guard waves them by after they flash their drive-on badges, and she isn’t sure what to do with her hands. Grant shoots her a crooked, reassuring smile that seems to wedge right into a wobbling corner of her heart. Almost there, it seems to say.
They walk past the usually bustling soundstages and rows of empty white trailers. It’s a sunny January day in Burbank and Helen is grateful for the excuse to wear sunglasses beside him.
“Have you ever been here on the weekends?”
“No,” she says.
“There’s usually some people working in the offices in the building,” he says as he holds the door open for her. “Not a lot, but . . . showrunners are a type A lot.”
“Oh,” she says.
“Suraya has a decent work-life balance,” Grant says as they walk into the elevator. “Thank god. The last showrunners I worked for would never break the room before eight p.m. I think they must have hated their families.”
The ride is a short, tense one and when the elevator doors ding open, they observe the ghost town of the bullpen outside their writers room.
“Come on,” he says, and leads the way through the familiar office space. He unlocks the door to the writers room, then shuts it behind them with a soft click, and Helen shivers.
They sit down across from each other, in their usual seats.
“So,” he says. “You’re worried it’s going to affect our work.”
“How could it not?” She crosses her arms. “I have to sit here and look at you every day for the next seven weeks.”
“Four weeks,” he counters. “After that, you’ll be on script, writing your episode, and when you get back, we’ll be at the point in the season where everyone’s ‘in the room’ but basically working remotely on their scripts all the time. Then production will start, and you and Suraya will always be wanted on set for something or other, and then after that, the room will be officially over and you’ll just be on set all the time.”
“And you won’t be there?” She frowns.
“Not unless Suraya needs me, but she’s more the on-set type,” he says. “My reps are already sending me materials for next shows to consider.”
“Oh,” she says.
“You said you had ground rules,” he says, tapping his fingers together in a way she’s seen him do in exactly this manner, when they’re working on a story beat just before he’s about to pitch something that throws the entire thing into the trash.
“Yes,” she says. “First of all—we both know this can’t . . . go anywhere.”
Grant nods slowly, tense. “Fair enough.”
“Either of us can end this, at any time,” she says.
He snorts at that. “So like any relationship, then.”
“This isn’t a relationship.”
Grant lifts a brow. “We’re negotiating the terms of how and when I get to fuck you,” he says. “I would say there’s some kind of relationship here.”
Helen swallows. He’s right, she knows.
“Not a real one,” she says. “Not a public one. Nothing on social media.”
“Fine,” he says.
She pauses. “Nicole and Saskia know we’re . . . something. I think maybe they suspected before I said anything,” she says.
He lifts a shoulder. “Considering I’ve been staring at you like a teenager with a crush for weeks, that’s not surprising.”
She flushes then, the word crush lighting up in her brain like a Broadway marquee sign, and she clears her throat.
“We set an end date after the writers room wraps in March,” she says. “A week afterward, maybe.”
“With an option to renew if both parties consent?” Grant counters. “That’s pretty standard language in most of the contracts I’ve had my lawyer write up.”
Helen taps her fingers on the desk nervously. “Option to mutually renew on a week-to-week basis.”
Grant lets out a short exhale that sounds like a laugh. “Fine.”
“But there’s a hard cutoff on contact once production ends and I’m back in New York,” she feels the need to add. “The goal is that when this is over, no one can say they were surprised by anything and it’s quick and . . . and painless as possible.”
Somehow, Grant doesn’t think painless is going to happen, but he doesn’t say it.
“So once you leave town, we both move on and pretend this never happened?” he clarifies. “No tortured three a.m. drunk voicemails, no texts when one of us is in the other’s city, no . . . anything.”
“Correct,” she says.
“Hm,” he says. “When would we start?”
Helen swallows. “Now, if you want.”
He taps a pen on the desk, watching her intently. “I want.”
She tilts her head, as if considering her next move. He thinks suddenly of playing Connect 4 with her, the lazy concentration on her face as she’d studied him and the grid. He’d won that game, but maybe she’d been playing something else entirely in her mind. Then she reaches for the bottom of her cropped sweatshirt and he stops thinking at all. She slowly removes the sweatshirt, revealing a thin sports bra underneath. He can just make out the shadow of her hardened nipples as she walks around the table toward him. He swallows as she stops a few inches from him.
“I have some addendums,” he murmurs, staring up at her.
She kicks off her shoes.
“No more casting directors,” he says. “Or actors, or camera operators, or other writers. Or anyone. If we’re doing this, it’s just me and you.”
She nods as she hooks a finger into the elastic of her yoga pants and peels them down, before stepping out of them. She’s wearing plain black cotton underwear, the same material as her thin sports bra, and he’s never been so turned on in his life.
“If I do something you like, you have to tell me,” he says, as his hand reaches out and traces the side of her thigh.
Her eyes drift closed and she bites her lip, then nods.
“And if I don’t, you tell me that too,” he says, lifting her hand and pressing a kiss into her palm.
Helen hums her consent.
“And finally—while we’re together,” he murmurs, his lips skimming her stomach, “I don’t want to talk about how it’s going to end. I’d rather not waste the time I have.”
Helen nods, her hands gently falling to his shoulders.
In a fluid motion, he lifts her up and places her on the table in front of him. He looks up at her like she’s a feast and he’s deciding where to start. Her legs dangle off the edge and he massages her calf, then bends his head and kisses the inside of her knee.
She exhales at the unexpected pressure and he stands, his hands running up her thighs and brushing past cotton and along her sides. His thumbs catch at the bottom of her bra and she shudders at the feeling of his fingers teasing under the elastic band.
He watches her intently, his thumbs sweeping the swelling sides of her breasts.
She inhales sharply as she meets his gaze—some molten-hot feeling floods her insides.
“More,” she tells him, and his thumbs brush her nipples beneath the fabric.
She used to be self-conscious about her small breasts and remembers worrying in high school about the moment she’d have to be naked in front of someone else for the first time, revealing a disappointing lack of soft curves. The men she’s been with in the years since have never said anything, often skimming past them after an initial curiosity-satisfying exploration and dwelling instead on her other, more welcoming parts.
Still, there’s a moment of hesitation every first time, as she braces herself for inspection.
Grant pauses, in the middle of pressing a kiss to the side of her face.
“What is it?” he asks.
“Nothing,” she says. “It’s stupid. I just . . . don’t like thinking about how my boobs measure up to other boobs.”
Heat flames her face as he pulls away to look at her. She’s painfully aware it sounds like she’s fishing for a compliment and decides the best way through this is to reassure him quickly, “Forget I said that. I love my body. You’re very lucky to be here. Come back.”
Grant listens. She submits to another long, drugging kiss, and his fingers come up to sweep her jawline and skate down her neck and shoulders.
His lips follow his fingers, and he kisses down to the scoop neck of her sports bra. She feels the warm, soft lick of his tongue against the fabric, scraping onto skin. She inhales sharply, and she’s certain he can hear the insistent tattoo of her heart against her chest.
His other hand brushes down her stomach, down past her underwear, and onto the tops of her thighs, finally drawing slow circles on the inside of her knees. She becomes aware of a keening sound that’s coming from the back of her own throat.
Grant lets out a low, answering growl as he runs his hand down to grip her ankle, and brushes his thumb over her Achilles, then her ankle bone.
“Why does that feel so good,” she breathes.
He follows the path of his hands again, dropping a kiss to her stomach, then the inside of her thigh—where he once wrote his address, she remembers suddenly—then her inner knee. Finally he kisses the inside of her ankle, resettling back into the chair, his gaze hot on her even as he maintains contact only around her ankle.
Grant leans back, his jaw tensing, his breath coming out in sharp, ragged pants.
Helen is most sensitive on the soft spots of her inner thighs, knees, and ankles, and he relishes in the knowledge of the discovery. He keeps drawing a slow circle around her ankle bone, unwilling to break contact completely—he feels like he’s just started a new favorite book and he can’t put it down or he’ll lose his place.
“I don’t think you realize,” he says slowly, “how often I’ve imagined this.”
His eyes rake slowly down her body; he can see the rise and fall of her rib cage.
“How often I’ve come into my own hand at the thought of you on this table,” he murmurs, and watches her eyes flare with heat.
Grant pulls his shirt off then and it drops in a heap on the ground.
“Do you ever touch yourself, Helen?”
She watches his hands moving toward his belt with such intense concentration, he can almost feel the heat of her gaze on his knuckles. She nods slowly.
In a few short movements, he unbuckles his belt and shoves his free hand—the hand that isn’t still drawing slow circles on her inner ankle—down his pants. He squeezes himself and lets out a shaky breath. His cock surges against his own hand, as if to remind him there’s a warmer, sweeter place for it right in front of him.
“Take off your bra,” he says, “and cup your breasts for me.”
She watches him as she takes the bra off, finally, finally revealing pebbling brown nipples and peaked globes that make his mouth suddenly water like a man starved. Her hands move up to cup them obediently, her eyes flitting from his eyes to his hand working slowly, rhythmically below his belt.
“Pinch your nipples,” he says, and is gratified to hear her gasp as she complies. She closes her eyes to the sensation as her head falls back, but he squeezes her ankle. “No, don’t close your eyes. I want you here with me.”
Helen opens her eyes then, her lips falling open in a pornographic pout.
“They’re so pretty, I want to lick them while you come,” he says, giving himself a harder tug.
She lets out the softest whimper, and he has to force himself to stay in his seat and ignore the all-consuming desire to dive forward.
“Do you ever think about me when you touch yourself?” he asks.
Helen exhales and nods.
“Show me,” he demands.
One hand drifts down her body, and she slides a flat palm against the front of that maddeningly enticing triangle of black fabric. She hooks a thumb against the elastic, while her other hand continues to work her breasts.
“I thought about you like this,” she says. “Sitting in your chair. Watching me.”
She squirms against her own hand, her mouth forming a perfect O at the sensation, and he can tell she’s close from the glaze of her eyes, the unselfconscious way she rocks against the table.
He drops a quick kiss to the inside of her knee, his hands flexing around her ankle and his cock at the same time. He has to slow down, he knows, but he can’t resist a final tug before he stands up between her legs. His pants fall to his ankles, and he thinks it must be very undignified but can’t be fucked to care when he can feel the heat radiating from her perfect pussy through the fabric.
“Helen, I think you’re going to make yourself come for me now,” he whispers into her ear, his fingers gripping the sides of her thighs. “And I’m gonna lick your nipples till you beg for me.”
She whimpers then, as he presses the hot flat of his tongue against one peaked brown nipple. He licks her like ice cream—slow, dragging, savoring the taste of her.
“I . . .” she pants, still writhing against her own hand, and it’s the hottest thing he’s ever witnessed. She lets out a tortured sob. “Please, Grant.”
“Please, Grant what,” he murmurs against her breast.
“The other one now,” she breathes, and he complies.
“I’ll give you anything you want, sweetheart,” he murmurs. “You just have to ask.”
She whimpers again, and he suckles her areola into his mouth, scraping his teeth gently against the nipple. She gasps then, and he feels her grind against her own hand once, twice, and her other hand flies up blindly to grip his hair as she comes apart on the table. He feels her shuddering against his tongue, under the iron grip of his hands at her thighs, and she lets out a single tortured groan before her breaths turn to shallow pants.
Her hands pull at his hair and urge him up until she’s kissing him desperately, as desperately as he feels like he’s drowning in her.
“I love your body,” he says, between bruising kisses. “I’m so fucking lucky to be here.”
She reaches down between them, slipping into his boxer briefs and holy fuck her hand is on his cock.
“I want to feel you,” she murmurs into his mouth. “Please.”
A strangled groan escapes his throat as she runs a thumb across his weeping head and squeezes his shaft.
“I have to—” He pulls away from her, thinking of the condom in his wallet, somewhere on the ground.
“I have an IUD,” she says suddenly. “I . . . please, Grant, I need to feel you.”
He gasps as she tugs him free of his boxer briefs, and tries to clear the pounding in his brain long enough to think. I have an IUD. I need to feel you.
“I had a physical at the end of last year,” he pants. “I haven’t been with anyone since—since—”
He can’t seem to finish the thought, because her nails are raking softly against his balls as she pulls gently against them.
“Fuck,” he says instead.
“Yes,” she says, and lifts off the table slightly to slide off her underwear. He looks down, slightly stunned, and watches as she guides the head of his cock against her folds. “Just—slow.”
He grits his teeth at the feeling of her taking him in, the tight heat enveloping him in slow, sliding millimeters. I’m fucked, he thinks, as he looks up to see her gasping at the sensation of him pushing into her. I’m going to need this forever.
Helen stares at Grant’s face, thinking through the fog, so this is what you look like when you do this.
His jaw is tense from concentration, and impossibly, he’s still sliding into her, the slickness of her heat making him surge forward faster now.
“Oh,” she gasps, as she squeezes involuntarily around him. He groans, as if pained, then jerks and tilts his hips, and suddenly she’s filled to the hilt by Grant. She gasps at the sensation of him inside of her, foreign yet growing more and more familiar—unforgettable—by the second.
His breath expels hotly by her temple, and his hands grip the sides of her hips as she rocks experimentally—once, twice—into him. He drops a restrained kiss on her lips and rests his forehead against hers, his eyes closed in concentration, and she thinks suddenly of how unfairly beautiful he is.
“Mm.” He exhales, and she becomes aware of him slowly pressing her into him, then easing off, then repeating. They both look down at the point where their bodies are joining and rejoining—her breath catches at how primal it looks.
“I . . . I can’t believe you’re fucking me on this table,” she says, and he lets out a short gust of laughter.
“I can,” he says. “I’ve thought about it so many times, it feels like I was remembering this.”
He runs a thumb down past her peaked nipple and slides himself out a little farther this time, before surging back into her.
“You feel so fucking good,” he exhales into her ear. “How dare you.”
She lets out a throaty laugh that turns into a gasp as he slams into her again.
“Grant,” she pants needily into his ear. “I think I’m gonna come again.”
His thumb slips between them, pinching her clit insistently, unrelenting even as she whimpers. She gasps, arching into him, and suddenly white-hot stars explode in her vision. He groans as she feels the pulsing wave of pleasure sweep over her body, rocking through her, and she’s forgotten to be quiet as she releases her orgasm in racked sobs.
Dimly, she becomes aware of him lowering her back onto the table, and she watches him with lazy fascination as he runs a thumb from her lips down her sternum. She bites her lip as he pulls back, then slams into her, the cold table rocking beneath her, then he pulls back again.
She reaches a hand up, and he captures her hand and kisses the inside of her wrist—a surprisingly tender gesture that catches her by surprise. He slides into her once, twice—she stares with wonder at the sweat on his brow—then he jerks out of her with a groan and she feels a hot stream of his come land in spurts across her stomach.
He drops his head to her neck and exhales in slow, ragged breaths as he comes back into his body. He kisses her shoulder, and laughs in a low, raspy way that makes her belly feel tight with some kind of unfamiliar wanting.
“Let’s do this every weekend,” he says into her shoulder, and she laughs.
He cleans her stomach off using wipes for the dry-erase board, and she already knows she’s going to blush anytime she looks at the prosaic plastic container (still bearing its $3.99 sticker from Staples) on Monday.
She puts her underwear and her clothes back on and remembers a vague conversation she had with Suraya in the early days of the writers room.
“Some writers are bad in the room, but great on the page,” she had explained. “It’s harder for them at the start, but when people discover them, they work.”
Helen had wondered if Suraya had meant to imply that Helen herself was bad in the room, so she had better be great on the page.
“But the vast majority of TV writers are good in a room, and somewhere between decent and pretty good on the page,” Suraya had gone on. “It’s an easier path to what a lot of people want.”
Helen had gone home that weekend trying to catalogue the writers in their room, rereading their spec samples that she had only skimmed when Suraya first forwarded them after the welcome drinks night.
Saskia was quiet in the room, but her sample had sparkled with heart. Nicole was consistently funny in the room, but had a tendency to run her mouth to the point of annoying Suraya—and Helen found her sample to have a similarly distinct voice. Owen, Tom, and Eve were good in the room—always funny and ready to build on the energy at the table, drawing connections from seemingly totally disparate conversational threads throughout the day. Their writing rose to the occasion too—more confident and capable than either Nicole’s or Saskia’s, but perhaps less special.
And Grant. She knew even then, he was great in a room. He always had been, and she had flipped through his sample expecting something hovering between adequate and good.
Then she read his sample pilot. She tore through his writing the fastest that night, drawn against her will into the tangled web of complicated relationships and secrets and lies binding his cast of characters together in a small seaside town of South Jersey. It wasn’t even the kind of TV show she’d ever willingly watch, yet when she reached the last page, she felt a stupid compulsion to text him to ask what happened next. (She didn’t, of course.) She’d been unpleasantly humbled by his work and the knowledge that no matter how great on the page she eventually was, he’d always be one up on her for being capable of both.
As Grant drops a collated printout of the first draft of his episode on the table in front of her, she feels a rush of nervousness. Not about his writing, but about hers. About the thought of him having spent a week intimately exploring the characters she had once dreamed up in the privacy of her own mind, in her first cramped studio apartment in New York, in coffee shops in Brooklyn, in public libraries around the city.
She worries that reading his script, she’ll catch an honest glimpse of how he sees her, and she’s afraid then it might ruin whatever burgeoning thing is happening between them. It feels more intimate than him being inside her body, somehow, and she catches a claustrophobic sensation building against her will.
“I’ll read it later,” she says finally. “Let’s go back to your place.”
He offers her a hand and she stands. He tilts up her chin to kiss her gently, and she feels a dizzy kind of warmth in his arms.
“Your heart’s pounding,” he murmurs. “Anything I did?”
She laughs.
“Pretty much always,” she answers, and he lets out a satisfied “hm” that fills her with a nervous kind of yearning.