Thirty-Five
Around 6:25 a.m., a magnitude 6.8 earthquake hits fifty miles off the coast of Northern California. At 7000 Hollywood Boulevard, the tremors last for 39.73 seconds, and Helen wakes up to the feeling of Grant’s arms wrapped firmly around her as the entire room rattles and jolts and she has the fleeting, half-dreamed thought that they’re on a rickety roller coaster ride that’s about to take off through the ceiling and also maybe Grant never showed up at her hotel room and it’s all been some terrible, wonderful dream. Don’t wake up, she commands herself.
“It’s just an earthquake,” Grant murmurs in her ear, and she discovers a new fear—he’s here, and she’s about to lose him again. There’s an awful, clattering sound as the ground shakes the foundations of the building and everything inside of it, from wooden furniture and porcelain dishes to star-crossed lovers, newly reunited. “You’re safe.”
“I’ve never been in an earthquake before,” she says, and suddenly it ends. She turns around to face him and she’s relieved to find that Grant’s still here, watching her with a sharp alertness. She reaches out and presses her palm to his cheek, and he waits patiently as she checks his solidness: he’s real. “You’ve been through a lot, I bet.”
Grant takes her hand and kisses her palm, then reaches out to trace her cheek, like he’s checking that she’s real enough to touch too.
“Sometimes there’s aftershocks,” he says finally, once he’s satisfied. “If you’re really staying here, we should probably go over earthquake safety at some point.”
There’s a hint of doubt behind these words, and her heart breaks for it.
“I’m really staying,” she tells him.
“Good,” Grant says simply, and his hand drifts down her neck, then travels a slow, warm path to her shoulder. She’s naked beneath the sheet and he seems fascinated by his own hand disappearing beneath the sheet too.
“Grant,” she exhales shakily, as his knuckles graze her ribs.
“Helen,” he returns evenly, and his brown eyes stay locked on hers as his fingers explore hidden curves and valleys beneath white fabric.
“Should we”—she inhales sharply—“leave the building, or something?”
She glimpses a flash of humor in his eyes.
“No,” he answers, and leans forward to kiss his way down her stomach. He takes her hands and places them on his head, and she tangles her fingers in his hair reflexively. “The first rule of earthquake safety is if you’re in bed, you’re supposed to stay there while it’s shaking.”
“Oh,” she says. Oh.
“Then you’re supposed to curl up and protect your head,” he continues, from between her thighs.
“That’s, um,” she says, and loses her train of thought, as his tongue strokes just there. “Ah.”
“Drop down, cover your head, and hold on to something solid,” Grant says, his low voice reverberating against the hot core of her.
“Grant,” she pants needily. “Please.”
He gives her what they both know she needs, and she bites her lip as the mounting tension breaks and an orgasm sweeps over her.
Grant resurfaces above her then, and his arms are braced around her in a way that makes her feel safe and loved, even as she isn’t sure if the tremors are coming from her body or the building.
“Think you’ll be able to remember all of that?” he asks as he repositions himself at her entrance.
“Yes,” she gasps as he pushes himself inside.
“Good,” he says in a strained voice. She loves watching him like this, when he’s wrapped in her heat and he’s close enough for her to watch every expression flicker across his face. His eyes are laughing even as the muscles at his throat work rather spectacularly. “Practice saying that for me.”
Helen squeezes him with her inner muscles, and his lips wordlessly form her name as he fills her to the hilt.
“You want me,” he prompts, and her breath hitches as he withdraws from her.
“Yes,” she answers, and he surges back in.
“Louder,” he demands, and withdraws again. “You love me.”
“Yes,” she says, louder, and he rewards her.
“You’ll stay with me, then?” he asks, burying his face in her neck.
“Yes, yes, yes,” she echoes, as he drives into her in a primal kind of rhythm, until her world splits apart and reassembles to the sound of his echoing climax.
Afterward, the air seems to be thrumming with something warm and familiar—a glowing, unspoken thing between them. Want me, love me, have me, keep me, her pulse races to communicate.
“We’ll have to figure out what to do about your parents,” he says then, and she laughs, out of breath.
“My parents are the last people I want to think about right now,” she says, and covers her eyes. “We’ll figure it out.”
It’s a rainy, early-September morning in Dunollie, New Jersey, when Helen announces Grant’s reappearance to her parents over FaceTime two weeks later. She can see the sparse branches of the trees rattling outside the windows behind them, and she thinks, the weather is so different here.
“I, um, I started seeing someone, in LA. I’m moving to LA. It’s serious. It’s . . . it’s him, it’s Grant. I’d like you to meet him. He’d like to meet you, when we’re getting my things in New York in a few weeks. But if you can’t be nice to him, then we won’t come.”
Mom blinks and laughs and makes that low, clucking sound she sometimes makes of scathing disapproval, then stands from the couch abruptly and leaves.
“I thought you were done with that,” Dad says. “Anyway, you don’t even know what’s going to happen. Who knows, in a year, maybe you will feel different. You shouldn’t bring up these things until you are more sure.”
“I am sure,” Helen says.
“You are very young,” Dad insists, and she thinks, I’m 32. “Don’t make decisions so quick.”
Grant squeezes her hand when she hangs up and looks over at him, an apologetic expression on her face.
“Let’s go to the beach,” he says, before Helen can apologize for family histories and complicated backstories that can’t be rewritten. “The weather’s perfect.”
It’s snowing outside the New York Public Library in January, and she’s pretty sure he’s going to propose. He knows she knows, she’s certain, because he keeps glancing at her and shoving his hands in his coat pockets, only to produce his phone.
“You’re so annoying,” she mutters as they present their bags to security and Grant makes a show of hiding his bag from her.
“You love me,” he answers, and whisks ahead of her to the reading room.
They sit beneath perfect blue skies painted on the gilded ceiling and pull out their laptops at a long wooden table in the back. Helen’s working on revisions for her memoir—her book of essays sold to her YA publisher’s sister imprint and has been newly retitled Sending All My Love. Grant has a pilot he’s revising, a heady, straight-to-series sci-fi world of his own creation. His spec script sold in a heated auction and has been cited hopefully in the trades as proof of the lingering value of original ideas in a marketplace of perpetual adaptation.
The two of them have been talking about coming to work here together for months—a chance to rewrite over the memory of their last near miss. Helen loves the silence of this place, the church-like atmosphere among fellow bibliophiles typing away in quiet industry. After about ten minutes, she realizes Grant absolutely hates it.
“Hey,” he whispers, and earns a few glares from the studious patrons around them. To be fair, it’s his third time speaking in the last minute, and it’s always been something mundane like “Can you move your chair?” or “Do you have the Wi-Fi password?” or, right now, “Can I borrow a pen?”
Helen hands him her best pen silently. He works out story beats in a black notebook, his laptop abandoned for a few moments before he starts tapping his foot with idle, pent-up energy. She covers his foot with hers, and he looks up.
“Sorry,” he whispers against her ear, bumping her shoulder as he leans in to say it, and she shivers despite the heat.
He stops tapping his foot, but five minutes later, his left hand starts tapping restlessly against her planner. A librarian clears her throat in a pointed way, and Helen covers his hand with hers and gives him a quieting look. Grant rolls his eyes, then glances down at her hand.
He flips his captured hand up beneath hers, and suddenly she’s the one who’s caught.
He looks up at her, and her heart jams in her throat. He presses a shushing finger to his lips with his free hand, then reaches into his shirt pocket and produces a ring.
It’s a simple round-cut diamond in a platinum, Edwardian-looking setting.
It’s perfect.
He holds it out to her casually and lifts a silent shoulder. What do you think?
Like they’re in silent study hall, and he’s asking her to prom.
Helen blinks. Time seems to be moving differently.
This is how Grant Shepard proposes to you, she thinks, and can’t quite believe it’s really happening. He’s the homecoming king!!! her seventeen-year-old self adds, unnecessarily, and she can feel the moment slipping away even as she wants to laugh at some future joke they’ll tell their friends about how many words does it take for a screenwriter to propose to an author?
Then she looks up and sees some flicker of nerves in his eyes, despite his casual posture, and her heart seems ready to collapse with the weight of loving him.
Yes, she nods.
Grant lets out a short, relieved gust of air, laughs roughly, and slides the ring onto her finger. He raises her hand and kisses her knuckles, then leans forward, their knees touching as he presses a kiss to her flushed cheeks, her nose, and finally her waiting lips.
They’re engaged.
It’s sleeting when they meet Helen’s parents a week later, at a dim sum restaurant off Route 22 that Helen remembers going to from ages eight through eighteen. On their way in, they pass a surly thirteen-year-old Chinese girl reading a thick novel while ignoring everyone else at her table, and Helen nudges Grant with some excitement.
“That one was me,” she says.
Grant keeps his eyes on the table ahead, where Helen’s parents are waiting for them. Her heart pinches at his grim expression.
“You’re going to be fine.” She squeezes his elbow. “A herd of wild horses couldn’t keep me from marrying you.”
The lunch goes as well as could be expected, which is to say, not great.
Mom refuses to place orders for the table, waving a hand toward Helen as if to say, have it your way, order what you want, I see how it is.
Dad tries to make conversation with Grant about his work, but mostly uses it as an opportunity to roast his entire filmography. “I saw that show you did, before Helen’s show. None of my friends have heard of it.”
When the check comes, Grant offers to pay, and Mom says stiffly, “Thank you, that’s very kind.”
Helen suppresses a despairing laugh—she remembers every world war her parents have started over their right to pay a dinner bill. They sit in silence waiting for the waitress to return for Grant’s signature, and Helen wonders if it was a mistake, insisting he not ask her parents for permission before proposing. Isn’t my permission the only one you need? Maybe she’d been wrong about that.
Her parents share a speaking look and Helen feels a foreboding twinge.
Mom sighs heavily, then says, “At least he’s tall. My sister, her daughter Alice married so short.”
She shakes her head and Grant looks to Helen like, This was not in the flowchart of possible responses.
Helen closes her eyes and mentally laughs until she cries.
“We’re thinking a summer wedding,” she says out loud.
Mom sniffs disdainfully, as if to say, of course you are, who am I to stop you.
“You will have to pay your respects to Michelle,” she finally says, her gaze trained on Grant.
Helen hands Grant two sticks of lit incense, and they both stand in front of Michelle’s smiling portrait on the bookshelf. She’s still thrown by the sight of Grant standing in her childhood home. It seems so impossible an image, her brain keeps commanding her eyes to check again.
“I don’t really know the proper way to do this,” Helen says. “I just know what I do. I hold the incense, I face her, I say, Hi, Michelle, and, um, whatever else comes to mind. And I bow. That’s kind of how it’s always worked in our house.”
Grant takes the incense from her and faces the portrait.
“Hi, Michelle,” he says. “I’m sorry you’re not here. I wish we all could have hung out together.”
“That would have been so weird,” Helen mutters beside him. “You know, usually we don’t do this out loud.”
“I don’t mind if you hear what I have to say,” Grant says quietly, and bows his head toward Michelle’s portrait again. “I want you to know I’ll take care of your sister. And thanks for having me here.”
“Then you put the incense sticks in the pot next to the photo,” Helen adds.
Grant follows her instructions. Helen smiles and shrugs.
“That’s pretty much it,” she says. “I’m never totally sure I’m doing it right.”
“You do it fine,” Mom says briskly, from the hallway. “It is not that complicated. Helen thinks too much. The important thing is we still have a connection to her. Chinese people care about this kind of thing, the living and the dead—we are all still connected, so we honor that connection.”
They get married outdoors in late August, on a sheep farm in Ireland. It’s a smallish, intimate affair of just under sixty guests, mostly immediate friends and family. The weather is suspiciously perfect.
“I feel like I’m in a fucking Thomas Hardy novel,” Nicole says as she sweeps up her bouquet and peeks out the window of the seventeenth-century croft house where they’ve been getting ready. “Lots of people and a couple sheep arriving out there.”
“Haha,” Helen says, and tries to ignore the churning sensations in her stomach. She’s wearing a simply structured dress of ivory silk crepe, with a long row of silk buttons up the back that had taken the better part of an hour for Nicole to hook up with a hairpin (making jokes all the while on the odds of whether Grant would torture her with his patience or “really lean into a bodice-ripper vibe” at the end of the night).
“I think these could probably seduce a dashing farmhand if the situation called for it,” Nicole murmurs, adjusting her boobs in a gilt mirror by the entrance. “Right?”
“Your tits look great,” Helen says. “I feel kind of like I might be dying.”
Nicole blots her lipstick. “Say the word, I’ll get the getaway car.”
Helen shakes her head. “No, I think this is normal. Right?”
Nicole shrugs. “You tell me, babes. How’s it feel, standing on the precipice of happily ever after?”
Helen lets out a strangled noise that sounds like a laugh, maybe.
She’s terrified of it. She’s terrified that she’s incapable of wanting something and getting it, of real life obliterating perfect weather and happy endings if she goes on for an extra chapter, or even an extra sentence. That just means you really want it, she reminds herself, as her heart hammers in agreement.
So she nods and says, “I’m ready. Let’s go.”
All things considered, it’s a pretty normal day.
The string quartet has some trouble finding a spot where both the guests and the bridal party can hear them, the florist forgets to add forget-me-nots to Helen’s bouquet, and there are some pesky wrinkles that Nicole just can’t steam out of the heirloom veil that’s been in storage for the better part of a century.
Still, when Helen takes her father’s arm and the sounds of Canon in D fill the air, she can’t help but feel the thrill of something a little extraordinary. They’re standing just out of view and Helen has to remind herself how to breathe, and they take a step forward.
“Slow down,” Dad says as they approach the makeshift aisle created by a profusion of chamomile flowers planted by Grant’s mother months ago, in anticipation of this day. “You’re walking too fast.”
“I’m walking a normal pace,” Helen says.
They’re walking down the aisle now, and with every step, Helen can see familiar faces who have known her at various points in her life. She feels a strange kind of nostalgia–sensory overload, as every smiling face unlocks some memory from the past—drinking champagne out of plastic cups, celebrating her first book deal at a hotel bar, laughing in a hospital over dirty magazines, crying in a bathroom over a bad book review, falling from the swings in a backyard, baking banana bread for the first time.
She looks up then, and—it’s him.
Grant Shepard. Grant Fucking Shepard, good in a room, great in a bed, and the improbable love of my damn life.
He grins, like he can read her mind. When she finally reaches him and he lifts the blusher of her veil, he whispers in her ear, “It’s nice to see you.”
She shivers a little and looks back at the crowd. She sees his mom first, her heart in her eyes, clasping the hand of the Irish sheep farmer she married six months ago. She sees her own parents, sitting in the front row, holding hands. Mom wears a brittle expression, and the corner of her mouth can’t seem to decide if it wants to turn up or down. Dad looks like he might cry at any minute.
Helen looks to the other side of the aisle and sees Nicole eyeing Grant’s father with blatant sexual interest. Nicole spots her and gives Helen a winking nice.
Grant squeezes her hand.
“Come hang out here with me,” he says quietly, and she looks up into his laughing eyes. “I missed you all morning.”
She smiles and feels a tug at the back of her dress.
“Shelley, no!” Grant’s mom exclaims, as a rogue sheep wearing a flowery collar chews on the silk crepe of Helen’s wedding dress.
Grant leans closer and her hand itches to reach out and touch his hair.
“The sheep’s name is Michelle,” he says. “If you can believe it.”
“Hold for wardrobe,” their officiant, an episodic director, quips.
They wait as Nicole wrestles Helen’s train from the sheep and Helen looks up into Grant’s eyes and thinks, This is it. She thinks wryly of how much easier things could have been for them in a different timeline, where they made a few different decisions, where everyone made some slightly different choices along the way. It would have been an entirely different story.
She thinks of the infinitely different love stories they could have lived instead—and she decides she’ll write them all. She’ll fracture this feeling into a million shards of glass reflecting back the same, unbelievable love story so she can capture it for the days when she needs to read it back to herself and to him—when they’re sad, or tired, or annoyed, or hurting. Or happy, she reminds herself. Loving him is poetry, and she thinks she’ll try her hand at that too.
“This is my favorite part of the day I married you,” Helen says, smiling.
“So far,” Grant agrees, and her heart—that reliable organ—beats loudly in agreement, in want me, love me, have me, keep me, in happilyeverafter.