Nine
“I still think we should move the piece with Bellamy and Phoebe sooner,” Eve says. “We already have the angsty slow-burn pining with Celia and James; we need another flavor.”
Helen studies the enormous glass dry-erase board, covered in blue and red and purple writing.
“Hm.” Suraya leans back in her chair, considering. “Where, though? If we move it any earlier, they still hate each other.”
“I mean, that could be hot, right?” Nicole says. “I vote episode three. Who hasn’t wanted to have hate-sex with their nemesis?”
“Do they even know each other well enough to be nemeses at that point?” Owen counters. “Phoebe only hates Bellamy because of what he did to her ex–best friend. That’s not personal enough for it to be full-blown hate-sex.”
“I was trying to tell a story about forgiveness with them,” Helen says. “Whereas with Celia and James, it was more . . . horny.”
“I mean, it’s horny in the books,” Eve agrees. “But if we boil it down to what they actually do, they’re just . . . staring at each other. Which is hot, but not necessarily horny in an ‘I can’t watch this with my parents in the same room’ way.”
“Could it still be a forgiveness story if they have sex earlier?” Nicole asks. “Like, I’ve totally hooked up with people and kept doing it because it made me feel like shit and that’s what I felt like I deserved at the time.”
“Aw, babe,” Owen says, squeezing her shoulder.
“Fuck off, I’m in therapy,” Nicole rolls her eyes.
“I’m with Nicole on this,” Grant says. He grabs a blue marker and writes Bellamy/Phoebe hate-sex?? at the end of a taped-off cell on the dry-erase board. “If we make it our end-of-episode-three cliffhanger, that gives us a bigger secret to drive a wedge between Phoebe and Iris, and it changes the dynamics of the Fall Ball too.”
“So instead of getting closer before they hook up, they’re doing it in reverse.” Suraya scans the board. “I like it. Helen?”
Helen feels the sudden burn of all eyes on her. She’s noticed that Suraya has taken to checking in when they pitch bigger differences from the book—never more than once, and always with a short “Helen?”
“Yeah, I think it’d be fun to watch,” she says. “I guess I’m just trying to work out what that looks like. Who initiates it, who wants it more, who makes it happen a second time.”
“You and your obsession with second kisses,” Eve laughs. She’s referencing a conversation they had a few days ago, when Helen had insisted the first kiss is just an icebreaker.
“They’re a bigger deal than first kisses!” Helen says. “They turn something that could be a one-off into something that could be significant.”
“Okay, but they’re not just gonna kiss,” Owen says. “All that tension built up.”
“I think she initiates it,” Grant says, staring at the board. “She’s feeling low, she’s looking for a way to get back at her best friend, she turns a corner, and boom, he’s there right when she needs an excuse.”
“I don’t know,” Helen muses. “I think it’s hotter if he makes the first move. It’s more . . . villainous.”
Grant lifts a brow. “And that’s hotter?”
Helen flushes. “Yes.”
“I’m with Helen,” Saskia says. “You kind of want it to feel like he’s doing it to piss her off.”
“And then she surprises them both because she’s into it,” Eve adds.
Tom holds up a hand. “Hold up—is this not gonna land us in a minefield of consent issues?”
“No, okay, I have it, I have it,” Nicole says. “He follows her into the bathroom after the drama in the library. She’s like, ‘blah blah, I hate you, fuck off, whatever.’ Then he’s like . . . looming over her, being intimidating on purpose, and it’s like a game of chicken; neither of them wants to back off.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Suraya nods. “He kisses her first. . . .”
“Thinking she’s gonna hate it and he’ll just leave,” Saskia adds.
“But then she pulls him back in and it’s on,” Helen says.
“Hot, clothes-on, self-loathing bathroom sex,” Eve nods.
“I should call my ex,” Nicole says.
“Is this hot to women?” Tom asks.
“Yes!” Helen, Nicole, Eve, and Saskia shout at him.
“In fiction, babe,” Eve says, patting his arm. “In real life, I much prefer a nice boy who can cook a mean lasagna.”
“Be . . . meaner . . . to . . . women. . . .” Grant says, and feigns typing into his notes app.
“Like he needs the help,” Owen says, and snickers.
“I haven’t gone on a second date since Labor Day,” Grant objects. “And Helen would agree: it’s the second one that makes it significant.”
“Only if you’re looking for something deep,” Helen says.
“I always go deep,” Grant winks at her.
“Oh my god, unless you’re gonna fuck one of us on this table while the rest of us get to watch, please shut up,” Nicole says.
Helen laughs. She realizes she must be acclimating to the rhythms of the room, because she would have been shocked into silence by Nicole’s outburst a month ago.
Instead, she says, “Nicole volunteers as tribute.”
“Please, he’s too wholesome for me,” Nicole says. “Besides, we all know Helen has a homecoming king kink.”
Grant lifts his brows, then turns over his shoulder and bites the marker “sexily.” “What do you say, Helen, do I have your vote?”
Helen snorts and dissolves into laughter with the rest of the room.
Tom and Eve invite everyone to their annual Christmas potluck right before the room shuts down for the holiday season. Helen makes sure to attend, after a somewhat sad Thanksgiving spent marathoning Gilmore Girls and watching everyone else go to their individual Friendsgivings on Instagram. She had thought maybe someone would invite her along, but no one in her cell phone contacts seemed to be hosting a dinner of their own. Suraya went out of town to her in-laws’ home (“pray for me, I’ve been assigned green beans”) and Grant had been in Vegas with his visiting father (not that she’d been expecting any kind of invitation from him). She’d ended up FaceTiming her parents and telling them she was going to meet up with some friends later, and then hung up to watch Lorelai and Rory road-trip to Harvard.
Helen drives along the Silver Lake Reservoir now, looking for parking. She loves driving, but she hates parking. Her first week with the rental car, she tried to parallel park on Ocean Avenue and ended up scraping the entire right side of her vehicle in the process. She left a hasty note on the windshield of the other car and drove home directly, then ghosted the guy from Hinge she had been supposed to meet.
She’s made only the barest of attempts at dating in LA—frankly she finds the game of swiping and messaging and flirting to be somehow both tedious and embarrassing. There shouldn’t be a written record of her rough-draft attempts at dating.
She finally finds a single spot that she’s pretty sure she’ll fit her hatchback Prius into and pulls up alongside the front car. As soon as she reverses, she realizes she’s misjudged—there’s no way the front of her car will make it. She tries to pull out, but it’s already too late—she’s somehow trapped herself.
She whines and allows herself a moment of self-pity before she opens the door and walks to the front to inspect the damage. There’s at least an inch of space there. Maybe she can maneuver her way out, centimeter by centimeter?
“Need some help?”
Helen looks up to see Grant standing across the street, on the sidewalk. He’s holding something wrapped in tinfoil (crap, she forgot the cookies she bought) and wearing a dark coat that looks like it’d be more at home on the East Coast.
“I can’t get out,” she says.
“You’re leaving the party this early?”
“No, I mean, of this spot. I won’t fit.”
He tilts his head and inspects the space. “Sure you will.”
She exhales shortly. Hangs her head. An admission—“I can’t parallel park.”
Grant lifts a brow. “Didn’t you pass driver’s ed with the rest of us?”
“Are you going to help me or just stand there and heckle?”
Grant grins as if that sounds like exactly what he wants to do. Instead, he jogs across the street and stops directly in front of her, a hand on the frame of her car. He peers behind her at the driver’s seat. “Do you want me to do it for you, or do you want me to tell you what to do?”
He’s suddenly very close for comfort—close enough for her to smell his aftershave (cedar + bourbon) and see the shadow of stubble on his jawline. Do you want me to do it for you, or do you want me to tell you what to do?
She swallows hard. “Um, you can do it.”
She moves out of the way and he hops into the driver’s seat. He adjusts the chair, checks the mirrors, and deliberately navigates her car into the parking space. He parks, exits, and drops the keys into her palm.
“Thanks,” she says.
“I remember now,” he says. “You failed the driver’s ed test.”
“I didn’t fail, I just had to take it more than once. It wasn’t a priority,” she huffs. “I didn’t have anywhere I needed to be.”
Grant laughs. “How many times?”
Helen pauses. “Three.”
Grant shakes his head as they walk up the steps. “Helen.”
“I was focused on my SATs!” Helen protests.
The door swings open.
“Oh look,” Eve says, wearing a bright red knit dress and cherry earrings. “Grant and Helen are here. Tom! Grant and Helen are here together. And they brought—”
Grant holds up a sugar-crusted pie. “Blackberry pie.”
Helen flushes. “I forgot to bring something.”
“Oh, that’s fine, we have way too much stuff anyway,” Eve says as she pulls them into the house. She deposits the blackberry pie onto a table as Tom brings over two mugs. “They brought blackberry pie.”
“Grant did. I’m just a terrible houseguest,” Helen says.
“Yeah, jeez, Helen, stop trying to take credit for my pie,” Grant says.
Tom hands them each a mug. “Mulled cider for you. It’s barely alcoholic.”
About an hour later, Helen is pleasantly warm from the cider and caught in a conversation with Nicole and her date, Ben (“this guy I’m dumping as soon as the weather gets warmer”). He’s surprisingly normal for Nicole, and Helen can see in the way he looks at her that he’s smitten and completely wrong for her.
“You guys went all the way to Forest Falls and didn’t go to Big Bear?” he’s saying. “Oh, we should do a trip together sometime. Maybe February.”
“Can you get me another one of these?” Nicole presses an empty mulled cider cup into his hand and he dutifully walks off. She shakes her head at Helen. “We are not going to Big Bear with Ben.”
She shudders.
Helen smiles. “He seems . . . fine.”
“Yes, exactly,” Nicole says. “He’s someone my mom would love me to date. I swear he seemed more . . . tortured when we met. You can have him if you want.”
Helen laughs. “I think I’m good.”
“Did you bring anyone?” Nicole asks, casting an eye around.
“No,” Helen says. “I’m taking a break from . . . meeting people.”
“Good for you,” Nicole says. “If you need recommendations for a good vibrator, I’ve got you.”
“Thanks,” Helen says, glancing around for Tom and Eve’s kids.
“Do you think you’ll stay in LA, after the room finishes?”
“Well, I’ll be around for filming,” she says. “And then . . . I don’t know.”
“Don’t know what?” Grant says, approaching with a slice of pie and two forks. Ben returns and hands Nicole another mug of cider.
“She’s debating whether or not to flee back to the East Coast once the show wraps,” Nicole says. “Because she hates LA and sunshine and everything us Hollywood elites stand for.”
“I like LA,” Helen says. “More than I thought I would, actually. It’s just that I’ve always seen myself as an East Coast person. I grew up in New Jersey, I went to school in New Hampshire, I moved to New York as soon as I could. Ninety percent of my wardrobe only works ten percent of the year out here.”
She takes a fork from Grant and takes a bite of blackberry pie.
“Buy new clothes,” Grant says with a shrug.
“Plus I think I’d miss the weather.”
“That is my great cross to bear,” Nicole says. “I’m a winter person—I belong where it’s winter. I swear, one of these days, I still might fuck off and move to Canada.”
“You can drive to weather, though,” Ben says. “And if you’re from the East Coast, you can always go back.”
“You’re going back this year, right?” Grant says.
“Mm,” Helen nods. “I wasn’t going to because it’s only been a couple months, but my mom called, and . . . the holidays are hard for my parents.”
Grant’s expression flickers and she resists a strange urge to reassure him of something.
He clears his throat. “Which airport are you flying out of?”
“LAX?”
“Rookie move,” he says. “I always book out of Burbank if I can for domestic flights. Half the wait time—it’s my favorite airport in the world.”
Helen laughs.
He lifts a brow.
“It’s just, in high school . . . I never thought I’d know Grant Shepard’s favorite airport in the world.”
“They went to high school together,” Nicole jabs her mug in their direction as she explains to Ben. “Supposedly they never even fucked, though I still find that hard to believe.”
Helen chokes on the blackberry pie. Grant slaps her back.
“Stop embarrassing her, Nicole,” he says. “Or we’ll never tell you about spring break sophomore year.”
“Haha,” Helen says weakly.
“Remember what I said about vibrators,” Nicole says. “I’ve got recs for multiplayer games too.”
Two hours later, Helen attempts to slip away without saying goodbye to anyone. Her flight’s the day after tomorrow, and she still hasn’t packed at all. As she heads down the hallway, the front door swings open—Grant appears, with a bag of ice.
“They were out, so I made a run,” he explains. His eyes flit over her, taking in her coat and purse. “You heading out?”
Helen nods. He hesitates in the doorway, as if debating whether to say something. Instead, he says, “Night, then.”
As she walks out the door, she hears people cheering his name behind her and it’s a reminder that no matter how far they leave the past in the rearview mirror, some things really never seem to change.
Grant shows up at Terminal 7 of LAX with his one carry-on bag and a grim determination to get on a flight out of this godforsaken city, one way or another, before midnight. After missing his first flight from Burbank because his elderly neighbor needed help retrieving her escaped cat from under the porch and then having his second flight canceled due to thunderstorms in Texas, he books a direct flight from LAX to Newark and vows never to fly the week of Christmas again.
It’s just after four p.m. when he tips his cabdriver and heads for the security checkpoint, only to find that the line to go through airport security wraps clear into a second building. Of course.
It’s past six by the time he finally gets through security and heads for his gate. His stomach grumbles that it’s time to eat, but he’ll be damned if he misses a third flight today.
As he stalks with purpose toward Gate 27B, he hears, “Grant? Grant Shepard!”
He turns to see—Helen. She’s sitting at the terminal’s wine bar, wearing a soft, gray, loungey travel outfit. Her cheeks are slightly flushed from calling out his name, and he feels a lick of surprised pleasure that it’s her. He frowns then—his flight plans can still get fucked.
“I missed my flight,” he says, checking his watch. “Then it got canceled. So now I’m here. I have to get to 27B. It’s boarding in—”
“Two hours,” she says. “It got delayed.”
His face must be one of utter devastation, because she pats the seat next to hers and orders another round.
“I hate flying out of LAX,” he mutters as he finishes off the wine she’s slid his way.
“It’s not so bad,” she says, looking around. “There’s good Wi-Fi and plenty of outlets.”
“And overpriced food, and miles of walking to get from one checkpoint to another, and a million shops that exist just to take your money while you’re trapped here,” he grumbles.
“You don’t travel well, do you?”
“I try to avoid it when I can.”
“When’s the last time you went home?”
“Home is LA,” he says, inspecting the menu and frowning at a thirty-two-dollar pizza. “But I get back every other year, usually.”
He orders a burger and checks his phone. Nothing new besides three texts from the airline.
“Are you looking forward to seeing everyone?”
Grant shrugs. “Not really.”
“That’s surprising,” Helen says, tucking into an overpriced crème brûlée. “I’d have thought—”
“What, that I love reliving my glory days in a basement with all my old football pals?” Grant raises a brow. “Give me some credit, Helen.”
She dabs at her mouth with a napkin. “I always got the impression you guys all stayed friends,” she says. “From Facebook and whatever. Like I always saw a post every year of you hanging out with that old crowd.”
Grant gives her a wry smile. “Been keeping tabs on me?”
Helen scoffs. “I just mean when I go home, it’s . . . it’s not like that.”
Grant frowns. He doesn’t like to think of her lonely in their small town.
“I did keep in touch with the old crowd,” he says. “Kevin Palermo throws a New Year’s party that I usually end up at when I’m in town. And I see a few of the others around then too. But the last few years, it’s like . . . our lives have been moving in different directions. They’re all getting married, having kids, buying houses.”
“You have a house,” she says.
Grant laughs. “Yeah, a two-bedroom bungalow in Silver Lake. Not a four-bedroom colonial with a two-acre backyard and room to grow with the family.”
“Do you ever wish you had what they have?”
Grant considers the question. “I’d like to be married someday. Have a family. But not right now.”
“Too busy sowing wild oats,” she says sagely, sipping another glass of wine.
“You leave my oats out of this,” he says, and she laughs. “No, I just . . . I have some work to do on myself. I don’t think it’d be very fair for someone to be saddled with all of this in a permanent way until I’ve figured some shit out.”
He feels Helen’s assessing eyes sweep over him warmly.
“Saddled with all of that, right,” she murmurs with pursed lips. He lifts a brow and she says dryly to her wineglass, “I bet the women of LA don’t mind so much.”
He chuckles and the corner of her mouth twitches up, and he wonders if that means what he thinks it does.
“I get it, though,” she says into her chardonnay. “My mom’s been sending me photos of all her friends’ kids’ weddings every chance she gets. Not so subtly hinting about grandchildren while she’s still here to hold them.”
“You want kids?”
“I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Most of my writer friends are either married with kids or freezing their eggs. I used to assume motherhood would be a given, but as I think about it more, I don’t know.” She tilts her head. “I guess I’m afraid of being responsible for someone who never asked for me. And I don’t want to do it alone.”
She looks down then, and it occurs to Grant that he doesn’t know much about Helen’s personal life. He’s never heard her mention anyone waiting for her back home.
“No current prospects?”
“No,” she says, and he can’t tell if she feels any type of way about that.
“What about Ian Rhymer?” he asks. “I hear he’s still kicking around Dunollie.”
Helen laughs. “I know, I usually stop by his pizzeria when I’m in town. But he got a Mohawk in senior year and I never really got over that.”
“So shallow,” Grant grins.
“What about you?” she eyes him as he finishes off his burger. “Do you ever hit up any of your old flames when you’re back home?”
He looks away, and she hits his arm with delighted shock. “You do! You have a hometown sex friend!”
“Let’s talk about something else,” he says. “What are you doing for Christmas?”
Helen snickers. “I bet I can guess who it is. Brittany Clark. No, wait, Desiree Evans.”
“Desiree got married last year,” he says evenly. “I sent her a nice card and money for her honeymoon fund.”
“Who was that other girl, the one you were with senior year for a hot second, the one with the bangs—”
“Lauren,” he says quietly. “Lauren DiSantos.”
“Right, her,” Helen says. “I always forget about her because she wasn’t a cheerleader. It’s her, isn’t it?”
It feels weird to talk about Lauren and Dunollie, New Jersey, when he’s still on California soil. He feels slightly itchy thinking about it, like he’s a bad person and he’s not sure who he’s disappointing here. Lauren, maybe, though he doesn’t think she’d mind being discussed outside of New Jersey. Maybe he’s just disappointing himself.
“I haven’t seen her in a while,” he says truthfully.
“But you’ll see her this trip?”
He shrugs a shoulder noncommittally.
“How did it start?” Helen asks.
“I don’t know. I was home for winter break in college and she didn’t mind the company,” he says. “Why are you so curious?”
“It’s kind of romantic, in a fucked-up way,” Helen says. “You’re the hometown boy who made it big, she’s your high school sweetheart who waits for you to come home every Christmas, hoping you’ll stay for good this time.”
“Stop projecting,” he says, feeling a twinge of annoyance. Lauren isn’t waiting and hoping for him; they both know what it is.
“She doesn’t ask too many questions and you like that, but that’s just because she googles you the rest of the year.”
“Stop,” he says. “Lauren’s a real person, not one of your characters we’re gonna punch up.”
Helen looks stricken, and he wants to kick himself for causing that wounded look in her eyes.
“Sorry,” she says. “You’re right, it’s none of my business.”
“It’s fine,” he says, and looks away.
“I have a hard time with people from high school,” she says finally.
“I know,” he says, and when he glances back at her, she’s looking at him too.
“I didn’t like myself very much back then,” she says. “And I worry, when I see people who knew me then, that they still see me the same way. So I make up mean stories about them in my head and they become less important, and it doesn’t matter because I’ll never see them again.”
The corner of his mouth lifts at this.
“You didn’t have to make up mean stories about me, though, did you?”
She’s saved from having to answer, as an announcement tells them their delayed flight is now boarding.
On the plane, Grant convinces the older woman next to him to swap seats with Helen.
“It’s my friend’s first time flying, and she gets nervous,” he says.
The woman agrees happily, saying something about adorable, and Helen rolls her eyes as she takes the seat beside him. “Your ego couldn’t take being the one who gets nervous flying, huh?”
Grant shrugs. “Window or aisle?”
Helen prefers the window. She likes looking out over the wing to see the moment they leave the ground.
“Works for me. I hate moving over people to go to the bathroom,” Grant says.
They share snacks that Helen bought back at the terminal, and after trading barbs about each other’s initial media choices on the flight—Die Hard for him (“so obvious”) and The Great British Bake Off for her (“what’s the point if you can’t taste the food?”)—they agree to watch the same thing.
“I love this movie,” she says, placing one earbud in her left ear as he takes the other and places it in his right.
“It’s a classic,” he agrees. “And a Christmas movie, though no one ever seems to count it as one.”
As three small mice appear on the screen to narrate the first chapter of Babe, Helen sinks farther under the thin, airline-supplied blanket and lets herself feel cozy. She glances up at Grant, who looks rapt by the adventures of an animatronic pig, enough that she can study him without feeling too easily caught.
He looks younger from this angle, she can see the teenager in him still like this. The Grant Shepard she’s spent the last ten weeks with is sharp and funny and wears his charisma like armor. This Grant sitting next to her now seems less guarded—tired, a little travel-worn, and somehow less self-conscious and more easily delighted.
Don’t be ridiculous, she admonishes herself. It’s the same Grant, there’s only the one.
“I actually love the evil cat most of all,” he says. “Where’s her movie?”
Helen laughs and redirects her attention to the screen. The warmth of his right arm presses comfortingly into her left shoulder, and when her stomach does a funny flip, she blames the turbulence.
Somewhere over Chicago and a half-hearted twenty minutes into Babe: Pig in the City, Helen drifts off to sleep. Grant supposes this isn’t the first time he’s been in close proximity with a sleeping Helen, but it’s the first time he’s been close enough to register the way she falls asleep with a slightly furrowed brow. As if even in her dreams, she finds something to disapprove of, something that could be nudged to become slightly better. So very like Helen.
“Drink?” The flight attendant pushes her noisy cart beside their aisle, and he waves her off quietly.
Helen frowns as she turns her head into her headrest, making a soft, whimpering “Hmmph” that crawls into the cracks of his chest and fills him with a strange and unfamiliar yearning.
So he quietly unplugs the earbuds they’re sharing from the middle armrest. When her head lolls to the side, he shifts his arm over slightly and she falls onto his shoulder. She turns her cheek then and faintly burrows into him. He resists an urge to drop his nose into her hair—don’t be a fucking creep, Shepard—and instead pulls out his Kindle from the seat back in front of him.
He’s pretty sure he’s read the same paragraph twenty times when the pilot announces over the intercom that they’re preparing for descent into Newark.
“Hm,” she says into his neck.
“We’re landing,” he answers, nodding slightly in her direction.
He can almost feel the second she comes back to full consciousness—when the warm, soft sleep in her body leaves and is replaced by a certain sharp stillness he associates with Helen Zhang.
The lights in the cabin come on and she abruptly lifts her head. She glances at his shoulder. He holds his breath.
“You’re a shit pillow, Shep,” she says finally, yawning as she adjusts a crick in her neck.
He laughs. “You’re a drooler,” he returns. “I’m sending you my dry cleaning bill.”
They disembark and Grant watches her bags while she stops in the restroom to brush her teeth.
Helen stares at her reflection in the mirror and wonders if there’s something about being in New Jersey that makes her hair look duller, her face more tired and drawn. She runs her fingers through her hair and flips the part in one direction, then the other, in a vain attempt at creating some volume.
Forget it, she admonishes herself. No one that matters is going to see you like this.
She feels a hot flush of embarrassment creep up her neck as she thinks about how Grant saw her on the plane—the evidence of that needy, drooling puddle on his shoulder. She wishes she could forget the first sensation of familiar warmth and cedar-scented aftershave that flooded her senses when her conscious brain started to come back online, the way her synapses fired energetic reminders: This isn’t the first time you’ve slept cocooned in the scent of Grant Shepard!
“Do you need to stop?” she asks, when she finds him waiting for her beside the water fountain.
He shakes his head, and they walk together down the long hall to the baggage claim.
“You have checked bags?”
“Just one,” she says, and he nods.
He waits with her as she scans the baggage claim. They pass the woman who traded seats with them—adorable—and see her reunited with her husband and son.
“It’s that one,” she says, indicating a large mint-green suitcase that matches her carry-on.
Grant leans forward and pulls it off in a swift, decisive motion for her.
“Thanks,” she says.
He glances at the signs for the taxi stands.
“How are you getting home?” he asks.
“Cab,” she says. “My parents are probably sleeping by now, and I have a key. You?”
“Same,” he says.
Neither of them moves. It occurs to her that with every step, they seem to be moving further and further into the past. Further away from the easy banter they’ve developed over the past few weeks, and back to a world where the Grant Shepards and Helen Zhangs of the world have no reason to exchange passing glances, let alone share earbuds and armrests.
The thought makes her unbearably sad for some reason.
“We should get going,” he says, and they walk to the cab line.
They wait in silence—he checks his phone, and she checks hers. She can’t help wondering if they’re both doing it on purpose—in case anyone sees, in case it’s important that no one who drives past notices anything interesting about these two near strangers on the curb.
She reaches the front of the cab line first and the driver moves her luggage into the trunk. Helen turns to find Grant watching her with a slight frown.
“Well,” she says finally. “Have a good break.”
He nods. “You too.” He hesitates, then adds, “Call if you get bored.”
“Ha,” she says. “Okay.”
She gets in the cab then and it drives off, taking her farther and farther away from Grant Shepard and his strong, warm shoulders.