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She could never quite shake the feeling that she wasn’t a particularly vital member of any group—she wasn’t the fun one, or the good-at-planning-things one, or the model-hot one.
Maybe being bad at things in front of other people is the secret glue of friendship.
This is what it would feel like to love Grant Shepard, she thinks, and it aches.
“You could keep me your dirty little secret, come to me tasting like other men, I’d still take you back every fucking time,” he says, a muscle ticking violently in his jaw. “I’d rather have a fraction of you than all of someone else.” Helen swallows. “I don’t want that for you. For either of us. It’s not—it’s not healthy.” “I don’t want to be healthy,” Grant says, and his chest is heaving as if he’s just run a marathon. “I just want you.”
The kind of ending where someone else sees the best and worst of me and loves me back. We’d be happy together, we’d be sad together, we’d be everything together. And when it’s all over and we’ve reached another ending, my ashes would be scattered over the tree that grows from his body because till death do us part wouldn’t be enough, because I’d need more than one brief eternity with him.
Yours, Helen,’” she reads, finally. “Are you?” His voice is hard and his words are cold. “Now or never, Helen.” Now or never. Helen contemplates a few eternities of nevers she’s already experienced. She never told her sister she loved her. She never told her parents unpalatable truths. She never felt as loved as she did the first time Grant Shepard held her in his arms.
Bring Grant Shepard back to the present tense, where he belongs.
“Yes,” Helen says finally, and she sees a flash of heat behind his eyes. ...
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“That day in the hospital,” he says slowly, carefully. “I think I lied to you. I told you—and I can’t seem to stop replaying it in my mind, whenever I think about it—‘I’d rather have a fraction of you than all of someone else.’” Helen swallows a lump of regret. “I remember.”
“I want all of it this time,” Grant says, his voice harsh and impossibly close. “I want the nights and the days and the weekends and the holidays and I want you at my side and in my bed and in my life. I want to meet your parents and I want to take you to a sheep farm in fucking Ireland and my dad’s place in Boston. I want to see what kind of person you are when you’re eighty. I want to do this for real, and I want to call you mine so badly it’s a fucking joke, but if you can’t sign up for the whole show this time, then don’t—”
“You don’t have to be completely healed to be everything I want. To be mine. I love every part of you, you silly, infuriating woman. I love the parts of you I haven’t even met yet.”
“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.
