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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.
He’s easy to look at and just sad enough to be interesting. The problem for Grant has never been beginnings. It’s that none of his relationships ever seem to survive a second act. Dating him, living with him, loving him becomes too sad, he needs you too much, and he always seems to be attracted to beautiful, complicated women who are smart enough to eventually recognize it’s not their responsibility to fix him, though they truly hope he heals someday.
She hates that she always feels ridiculous trying to wear her own anger—like it’s the wrong size after too many winters spent at the back of her closet.
she feels like she’s just been judged in a competition she wasn’t aware she’d entered.
There was a period of time a few years after her sister’s death when Helen was consumed with wondering whether it was possible to communicate with the dead.
Maybe being bad at things in front of other people is the secret glue of friendship.
Oh no, she thinks with a laugh, I’m thirty-one and peer pressure still works on me.
“You were the literal homecoming king,” Helen says. “No one needs to feel sorry for you.” “Homecoming kings have hearts too, Helen,” Grant says, feigning an arrow to the chest.
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.
Helen sits in an armchair by the window and picks out a book—The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. She keeps reading from where she left off, her last trip home. Sometimes she’ll find a dog-eared page or an underlined passage telling her where Michelle once left off too. Helen has read through their entire shared collection twice (just in case she missed something).
“Why did you come to the church that day?” she asks. He hesitates and she becomes aware that they’re holding hands still. He studies their gloved hands as he contemplates an answer. “I felt like I should,” he says. “I didn’t really want to. I just felt like . . . I owed it to her, or something. It was stupid, in retrospect. I was thinking about me and not how it’d make your family feel. My dad tried to talk me out of it, to be fair.” “It must have been hard for you,” she says. He laughs mirthlessly. “Hard for me,” he murmurs. “You lost your sister.”
“It’s the life-and-death stakes. Everyone wants to believe they could save someone else’s life, if they saw the right signs, had the right tools. Like maybe, if I say the right words, in the right combination this time, she’ll choose life. But that’s not how it happens.” She laughs, a short brittle one. “What happens is your sister withdraws and becomes distant, but not all the time, and you think, she’s just being a teenager, and then you find out she’s doing things you’d never dream of doing—she had a boyfriend and a drug dealer before I even had my first kiss—but you want to be cool about
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Can I sleep here? The words had slipped out innocently enough, but she may as well have just said, Please will you fuck me so hard we both forget our names?
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.
“Sometimes I feel like I miss you when you’re right in front of me,” she says as he nudges her cheek with his nose. “Isn’t that weird?”
“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.”
She looks away from him, as if she’ll find the right words in his cabinets somehow. Good luck, he thinks, those cabinets work for me.
Helen is doing well, though, if anyone asks anyone else.
You’re the demon I don’t want to exorcise. If I heal and move on, I’m worried I’ll finally lose you for good.
