How to End a Love Story

by Yulin Kuang

Their natural lives should have taken them far, far away from each other, never to meet or think about each other again after graduation. Helen takes the drink and knows she’s going to lose whatever game they’re playing first.

She immediately hates how he does that, the way nothing she says or does seems to faze him, when she feels nothing but affected. She’s vibrating from a sensation both familiar and strange—being in unexpectedly close proximity to him. Her heart slams against her chest in an impressive effort to meet the wooden deck floor, or perhaps to tackle her sister’s murderer.

“Helen, I didn’t want to kill your sister and I’ve had to live with that every day since, and I’m not asking you to forgive me but you know just as well as I do, it could have been anyone’s car she jumped in front of; it just happened to be mine.”

Helen looks back out toward the street, silent. It was in the early days—when he first started college—that Grant thought about Helen the most. It had been strange to know someone connected to the same tragedy as him was also going through the same off-to-college rituals as him—orientation week and moving into a new dorm and meeting her new roommate and learning her new city.

for which he had written out all the conversations he wanted to have with her as poems.

Grant on the writing staff, despite having spent their last two in-person interactions in open hostility.

What happens next? she keeps finding herself wondering in his company.

“I mean it. Not just because of everything you’ve accomplished so far, though that’s impressive too. But because I have a fraction of an idea of how shit your senior year of high school was. And to go through all that and be as . . . tenacious as you are, as strong as you are—that’s fucking big impressive, Helen. I know I’m the wrong person to say all this, and mine is the last opinion you care about, but I think you should know, I . . . I admire the shit out of you. As a person.”

“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?”

“Pretty much nothing,” Helen laughs. “Sulk in my bedroom and regress into my teenage self, mostly. It’s like time doesn’t pass in our house.”

Michelle Zhang May 24, 1992–June 7, 2008 Beloved daughter, sister, friend.

Sad loss grief

“I took her suicide really personally,” she laughs, and it comes out a stifled, wet sound. “It felt like she took all the love I had to give and said, no, it’s not good enough. Which is probably not the healthiest way of looking at it. But—I am so sick of always being the healthy one.”

But I have no idea what . . . what she actually would have wanted.”

“Was there a note?”

“I guess I feel the way you feel about places, with trees.”

“I feel like you’d be an oak tree. It’s like the golden retriever of trees.”

“God bless this home with love and happiness.” This is where Grant Shepard comes from.

So far, he could say Helen Zhang is responsible for two of the quickest, hottest orgasms of his life.

Grant Fucking Shepard.

Helen Zhang

“I’ve seen you,” he says into her neck. “I can’t seem to stop, in fact.”

“How much am I allowed to see, Helen?” he

“You’re my favorite thing to look at in that room,”

“And no matter how hard I try”—he

gasps—“you never look back at me.”

“You taste so fucking good,”

“I could dine on this pussy every night and come back for dessert.”

“It’s washable marker,”

1847 Rotary Drive.

the best damn kiss of her entire life

“Went a little caveman there.”

“You gonna ride my finger like a good girl?” He kisses her neck.

His fingers press to the hilt.

“You’re funnier than I thought you’d be,” he says. “Before I knew you.”

She thinks they must have both taken a few accidental wrong turns somewhere and feels a pressing, surprised kind of panic as she realizes how close they must have come to never having this happen at all. She feels like this bed and this morning and this something between them exist only in a precarious bubble, and it might burst into nothing as soon as she leaves.

“There you go again,” he murmurs, tracing her cheek with his knuckle. “Thousand-yard stare while I’m right in front of you.” “It’s just . . .” She pauses, and leans into his touch. He’s so good at touching her, she thinks she might miss this forever. “Brain goes vroom vroom. But I’m still here.”

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.”

“I’m not gonna last much longer.”

“Me too,”

“Can you wait for me?”

“What do you need?”

“Just this.”

“This, and you, and this, and...

“Helen,” he rasps into her neck. “...

“You have me too,”

“I think maybe people were invested,” she murmurs. “Fucking TV writers,” Grant laughs. “They should know better.”

This is what it would feel like to love Grant Shepard, she thinks, and it aches.

“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.”

“It’s my birthday. Lie to me. Treat me like you love me back.”