Twenty-Five
It’s remarkably easy to imagine what it’d be like to love Grant Shepard.
Helen sets up the dinner table with placemats he has because his mom forced him to take them back to California after Helen made a passing comment about liking their place settings. They’re made from a plain linen fabric and feature a scrolling embroidery border (“stitched in the 1920s by his great-grandmother Margaret!”) and are unlike anything Helen ever had growing up.
Grant cooks his own birthday meal—he’s using old family recipes from a box she found in his kitchen a while back, and she once took an edible and separated out each dish she wanted him to make for her. Folded in between instructions on hot cross buns and Christmas roast and steak Diane, there are newspaper clippings boasting of local events featuring Grandma Vicki’s famous German-Irish apple cake and Grandpa Carl judging a “nicest ears” competition. There’s even a photo of seven-year-old Grant and Grandma Vicki in the kitchen, covered in frosting and bad sweaters and perfectly joyful smiles.
“I wish I knew you then,” she says, touching the smiling Grant in the photo.
She thinks of where she must have been at the time—in that first cramped apartment in Union, New Jersey, sharing a bedroom and learning about mind over matter, probably—and feels some familiar ache stretching up.
Present-day Grant brushes a kiss to the side of her head and gently nudges her away from the stove to stir some delicious molten thing.
“You gotta stop saying things like that out loud—everyone will know,” he says, a teasing note in his voice.
She turns and grabs him by the collar and kisses him very suddenly, and his arms come up automatically to meet her. When she releases him, he has an endearingly mussed quality about him, and she wonders how long she could make that last. He looks surprised, and pleased. It’s a good combination on him, and she’d make him wear it every day if she had the right to.
“Okay,” she says, and returns to her task of chopping spring onions.
He glances sideways at her.
“How much time do we have?”
She glances at her cell phone.
“Not a ton. Nicole’s coming over early with Owen to heat something up in the oven.”
She moves off to the sink, when he suddenly catches her in his arms.
“Not what I meant, crackerjack,” he says, and she vaguely registers that he’s got two nicknames for teasing her now—sweetheart for filth, crackerjack for something sweeter. “How much time do we have, you and I?”
She stares back into his eyes and thinks she’s so close to falling into them, she might have already done it.
“Enough,” she says.
“I’m not so sure about that,” Grant answers slowly, rubbing his thumb on her forearm, and the doorbell chimes. He lets her go. “Saved by the bell.”
Nicole and Owen bring baked brie and charcuterie and demands for wine.
Owen slaps Nicole’s arm when he sees Grant gently brush back Helen’s hair as she stoops to open the oven door.
“Nothing, nothing,” he cackles, when she turns around quizzically.
Grant covers her pinkie on the counter with his own, and she looks up at him for just a second before they hear Owen fake a heart attack, put up a staying hand, and say as he walks away, “This is too much. I need to gather myself.”
Grant laughs and drops a kiss to Helen’s shoulder. Nicole lifts a brow.
“Well,” she says. “Hot.”
And she leaves too. Grant turns to Helen, and they both laugh.
“I think maybe people were invested,” she murmurs.
“Fucking TV writers,” Grant laughs. “They should know better.”
Tom and Eve arrive with a chocolate lava cake and Saskia brings bruschetta. No one says anything when Grant touches the small of Helen’s back, or when her fingers hold on to him until the last possible moment when he leaves her side to check the carrots.
When he returns, he rubs her shoulder and his hand travels up to brush the nape of her neck. Helen catches his hand automatically and brushes a kiss against it without thinking.
“Now, come on,” Tom says plaintively. “Someone else has to have seen that!”
The room bursts into laughter, and Helen feels herself laughing too as Grant loops his free arm around her and presses a kiss to the side of her head.
This is what it would feel like to love Grant Shepard, she thinks, and it aches.
After dinner, everyone leaves one by one, staggered, cheeks flushed with conversation, until only Tom and Eve are left.
“He’s going to gloat about this forever,” Eve says, and laughs, as they head to the hall. “He’s been telling me I don’t know what a ‘soft launch’ is for weeks.”
“Hey, you guys should come over for dinner,” Tom says, sounding slightly sloshed. “And if you get married, I should officiate—”
“Okay, let’s get you home, Tommy,” Eve says, and pushes him out the door as she mouths an apology at them. Grant shuts the door with a click behind them.
Leaving them alone together. Again.
Helen looks up at him, grinning. “Did you have a happy birthday?”
He laughs, and he can feel her laughing too when he kisses her.
“Helen,” he says softly, and he watches her expression go from hazy and dreamy to wary and alert.
“No,” she says. “Let’s not talk anymore.”
“I have something to tell you.” He nudges her gently with his nose.
“Unless it’s about—something else, I don’t want to hear it,” she says, and walks away.
He exhales and follows her into the kitchen. She’s cleaning up, putting dishes in the dishwasher, her hair in a messy, frustrated ponytail. He’s so in love with her it hurts.
“We can’t not talk about this forever,” he says.
“Sure,” she says, rinsing things. “We won’t be talking in a few weeks, anyway, so we can absolutely not talk about this . . . forever.”
“That’s crap and you know it,” he says, annoyed he sounds like a 1950s movie gangster. “March is right around the corner and neither of us is going to want to be done with each other in a few weeks.”
“You don’t know what could happen in a few weeks,” she says.
“It was a slow fall but a pretty permanent crash, Helen,” he says, and he can’t help the acid note in his voice. “I’m in love with you.”
“No, you’re not,” she says.
“Yes, I am,” he says softly. “It’s my birthday, and I say so.”
Helen shakes her head and walks to the opposite corner, out of grasp.
“You just think you are,” she says, studying her hands. “This isn’t . . . you care about me, but . . . some fucked-up thing in our past is what’s tying us together. We never would have started this otherwise, and you’re confusing the two things—”
“That’s not what this is,” he says. “This is about who you are and who I am, right now, in the present. Why won’t you let me just—”
She kisses him then, cutting him off from love you. It’s a hungry, angry kiss, and he returns it.
“Fine, then,” he says against her mouth, and he’s suddenly cold despite the kitchen heat. “It’s my birthday. Lie to me. Treat me like you love me back.”
His kiss slows and she pulls away from him. She’s staring up at him and there’s something crashing in her chest at his expression.
“Grant,” she says, and reaches out a hand to his face.
When she kisses him, it’s slow and deliberate. It broods into something bruising and searching in seconds.
“Is it so hard to pretend you love me, Helen?” he asks softly, kissing a trail up to her forehead.
“This is very,” she breathes, “melodramatic.”
“We’re artist types,” he answers. “Humor me. I’ll even take back what I said. I’m not in love with you at all, Helen. There, we’re even. Now we can both just . . . act like it.”
“Should I put on my best Katharine Hepburn?” she says, softly affecting a transatlantic accent.
“Yes, sweetheart,” he murmurs, returning it in his best Jimmy Stewart.
Helen laughs softly. “You’re so fucking corny,” she says, and kisses him sweetly. “I love you.”
She’s lying, she’s pretending, this isn’t real.
“You did that so well,” Grant says, as some knife of a feeling twists in his chest.
Helen lets out a half-embarrassed laugh and ducks her head.
“I would have fallen in love with you sooner, if you’d let me,” he says, and lifts her chin so he can watch her hear it. “You’re so easy to love, Helen.”
She kisses him then, and he thinks to himself still counts still counts still counts as he loves her back.
Helen wakes up in the blue light of four a.m. and gets in her car. She pulls up a Spotify playlist—“driving away from the stupid damn love of my life”—and heads home.
He shows up at her condo Sunday afternoon, looking tired and drawn.
“I’m sorry,” he says first, and reaches out. She buries herself in his arms in a crushing hug, and he rubs a soothing hand down her back and up the nape of her neck. “Won’t bring it up again, crackerjack. I know the rules, I promise.”
“This is all I can give you,” she whispers. “This is the best I can do.”
“I’ll take it, you know I’ll take it,” he says gruffly into her hair, thinking some senseless, endless stream of want, need, give, take, please.
He kisses her then, and she kisses him back.