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Grant wonders sharply what it would be like to know something about Helen Zhang.
Helen tries to remind herself that her least favorite thing about herself is how much she cares about what other people think. And that they probably aren’t thinking about her anyway.
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?
Are they supposed to sit in a room and pitch storylines and jokes and pretend he didn’t jack off three times this weekend to the thought of other things he could have done to her warm, willing body while she was still beneath him?
She’s wearing a silky black dress that looks like it’s a few molecules thick, which is ridiculous in this weather and also fucking hot.
She feels powerful then, like he might do anything she asks, just now.
He isn’t sure how much she’s willing to give, but he suddenly finds he’s willing to take whatever he can get, for as long as it lasts.
Like a useless sixth sense, she always knows immediately when he’s in the room.
It’s so much and not at all enough.
“You’re my favorite thing to look at in that room,” he says suddenly, and drops to his knees in front of her.
She wants to lick every inch of him until he doesn’t have a thought left in his brain.
He ignores a twinge of this might hurt more later, somewhere under his ribs.
It’s messy, the way they want each other, and she doesn’t seem to care.
This is what it would feel like to love Grant Shepard, she thinks, and it aches.
“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.”
Grant chuckles and she thinks, I would keep this feeling, if I could.
“I like your tortured drama,” he says plainly.
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.
She thinks of the infinitely different love stories they could have lived instead—and she decides she’ll write them all.
