8. Grant
Grant
It’s only taken a few weeks and I've built a life I didn't plan. Tuesdays and Thursdays are chemo days. Wednesdays, Mom has bridge club. Fridays, I have Sophie. We steal other afternoons where we can.
Every single time, I remind myself it's temporary. That this ends. That we agreed.
It's Friday afternoon. Mom's at the table doing a crossword. I'm at the kitchen table with my laptop, answering emails, not thinking about Sophie arriving in three hours.
My phone buzzes. Email from David Kowalski.
Subject: Brazil Contract — Timeline Update
They want to start in late September. That's eight weeks. Should work with your timeline.
Eight weeks.
I have eight weeks left in Copper Falls.
My chest does something I don't have a good name for.
I read the email three more times, like the number might change if I look at it hard enough.
It doesn't. Eight weeks is eight weeks whether I check it once or thirty times, and I've apparently decided to find out exactly how many times it takes before the number stops feeling like a wall closing in.
"You okay?" Mom asks without looking up from her crossword.
"Fine."
"Liar." She fills in a word. "You've got that look."
"I don't have a look."
"Seven letters. 'Temporary state of chaos.' Starts with T."
"Turmoil."
"That fits." She writes it in. "You've seemed in a state of turmoil lately."
"Work stuff."
"Mm-hmm." She sets down her pen. "Timeline for the next project?"
"Late September."
"That's soon."
"Two months away."
"Still soon." She folds her hands. "You'll miss my last chemo treatment."
The guilt is immediate. "I can push the start date—"
"No." She reaches across and pats my hand. "You can't hold your life for me. I'll be fine. Sophie will be here." She looks at me steadily. "The question is whether you will be."
She goes upstairs for her nap. I close my laptop.
I pull up David's email and don't respond to it. I sit there instead, in the quiet kitchen, and do the math I've been avoiding since I read the subject line. Four weeks gone already. Eight left. Twelve total — exactly three months, exactly what I told her on day one.
Except back then it was a plan with room in it. Now it's a flight number, and there's no more maybe in it anywhere, and I think about the conversation I'm going to have to have tonight and every reason I could give her for not having it yet
I could wait until tomorrow. Let her have one more easy evening before I hand her something she's going to have to carry.
I know exactly what that impulse is. I've used it before, in other contexts, with other people — the soft, reasonable-sounding argument for delay that's really just cowardice wearing a better coat.
I've watched myself do it in the field, holding onto bad news a day longer than necessary because the person receiving it deserved one more good night's sleep, and I've watched it always cost more than it saved.
I'm not going to do that to her. I tell myself that with more conviction than I currently feel.
***
Sophie arrives at six-thirty.
I've been pacing since six, which is not information I'm going to offer to anyone. When I hear her car in the driveway, I make myself sit down on the couch like a person who was just sitting here naturally.
She lets herself in with the key I gave her last week. Sees me in the living room and smiles, and I forget the Brazil email for approximately ten seconds.
"Hey."
"Hey."
She crosses to me and I pull her in and kiss her like I haven't seen her in weeks. She melts into it, hands in my shirt, and for a minute everything else recedes.
"Missed you," I say against her mouth. I pull back to look at her. "You seem tired."
"I'm fine." She studies my face. "You seem tense."
"I'm fine."
"Grant."
I should tell her about the email. I'm going to tell her about the email. I kiss her instead — hard and desperate, the kind of kiss that's trying to answer a question she hasn't asked yet — and she pulls back.
"Bedroom," I say. "Now."
She goes still. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong. I want you."
"You always want me. This is different." She touches my face. "What happened?"
"I'll tell you after."
She looks at me for a long moment. Then she takes my hand and leads me toward the stairs, which is its own kind of trust, and I don't deserve it as much as I'm going to take it.
We make it upstairs. She starts undoing my shirt buttons from the top and I watch her do it.
"Let me," she says. Focused, deliberate — it's the same attention she gives everything, patients and her work and now me. She pushes the shirt off my shoulders and runs her hands across my chest, fingers finding the old scar along my ribs like she's checking it's still there.
I feel it differently when she touches me. Like I'm being learned.
She unzips her own jeans, steps out of them. Her sweater comes off. I help with her bra because I'm impatient and she laughs, which is better than anything in the Brazil email.
"I want—" She glances up at me, something bold and a little shy at once in her expression. "Can I?"
"Yes," I say, before she finishes the question.
She drops to her knees.
I'm not prepared, even though I should be. She takes me into her mouth and I brace one hand on the dresser and the other goes into her hair, soft and warm, and she finds a rhythm that removes most of my higher cognitive functions almost immediately.
Sophie. On her knees in front of me, looking up when she wants to watch my face, absolutely in control of this moment.
She does something with her tongue and I swear under my breath, low and rough.
She does it again, because she's learned what I respond to just like I've learned her, and I realize I'm close faster than I have any right to be — faster than I've been in longer than I want to admit, undone by a woman who's had four weeks of practice reading exactly what makes my hips jerk forward and my breath go ragged.
"Sophie—" My voice comes out rough. "I'm going to—"
She pulls back. Rises. Kisses me with unhurried confidence, like she knows exactly what she's doing to me and intends to keep doing it.
"Bed," she says. "Now."
I put her on the bed.
I go down on her until she's shaking and saying my name in the urgent, breathless way that I've been storing in some place I don't examine too closely.
She comes with her fingers in my hair and her back arched off the mattress, and I work her through every second of it, watching her face the whole time, memorizing the exact moment her breath catches and holds.
Then I'm inside her, and she wraps her legs around me, and the desperation that's been sitting in my chest all afternoon finds somewhere to go.
I need her. Not just this — though I need this too, need it more than I've needed anything in longer than I'll admit out loud — but her specifically.
The way she argues with me about Patty's medication schedule.
The way she keeps the half-dead succulent.
The way she'll sit in the kitchen with Mom for an hour talking about nothing and everything, and when she leaves, Mom looks like she's been filled up.
I find her clit while I move and she gasps.
"Grant—"
"I've got you."
"I know." She arches up into me. "I know you do."
I move harder into her, chasing something I can't name and don't want to examine too closely, and she meets every thrust like she's chasing it too.
She comes again with her nails in my back, which I am entirely fine with.
I follow her, burying myself deep, groaning her name into her shoulder, and the world narrows to this room and this woman and the particular sound she makes when she finally lets go completely.
I lie with her in the gathering dark of my childhood bedroom and keep her close, her heartbeat slowing against my chest, and I think about eight weeks.
"You're going to tell me something I don't want to hear," she says.
It's not a question.
"Yeah."
She sits up. Puts space between us. Not much, but enough to look at me clearly. "Okay. Tell me."
"The Brazil contract. They finalized the timeline." I hold her gaze. "Late September. Eight weeks."
A long silence. I can see her processing it — the careful, controlled way she takes in information she doesn't like, the same way I imagine she processes a bad scan result before she has to walk into a room and deliver it steadily to someone else.
“So there's no more maybe."
"Sophie."
"It's fine. This was always the deal." Her voice is tight, controlled. She starts reaching for her shirt.
"It's not fine."
"Yes, it is." She pulls on the shirt. Won't look at me. "We agreed. You leave, I stay. That was always the arrangement."
"What if I don't want the arrangement anymore?"
She stops. "What are you saying?"
"I don't know." I sit up. "Mom asked me today why I don't stay. Turn down the contract. I don't have an answer to that."
"Because you can't—"
"Can't or won't?"
Something flickers across her face. Hope, and then fear, which is a thing I've done to her, put that fear where hope was. "Don't," she says quietly.
"Don't what?"
"Don't say things like that unless you mean them." She finally looks at me, and her eyes are wet. "Don't make me hope for something that's not going to happen."
"What if it could happen?"
She shakes her head. Gets up. Starts gathering the rest of her clothes, movements sharp and efficient in a way that's its own kind of tell — Sophie gets more organized, not less, when she's trying not to fall apart.
"You're going to get on that plane, Grant. That's what you do. I'm not angry about it. But I need you to be honest about it instead of—" She stops. Her voice is not as steady as she wants it to be. "Instead of making me believe something different."
"Sophie." I stand. "Wait."
"I can't." She's got her jeans on. She's not crying and it's almost worse than if she'd cried. "I need to go. I need to think."
I reach for her. "Don't leave like this—"
"I have to."
She's at the door. She pauses.
"Don't tell me you're thinking about staying," she says, "unless you mean it. And don't promise you won't hurt me unless you're sure." Her voice is very quiet. "I've had promises from Guilligan men before."
Then she's gone.
I sit on the edge of my bed in the empty room and listen to her car start in the driveway. Listen to her drive away.
The Brazil email is still open on my laptop downstairs.
I have eight weeks to figure out what kind of man I'm going to be.
***
Mom comes home from book club at nine-fifteen.
"Good book?" I ask.
"Wonderful. Woman kills her husband and frames the dog walker." She sets her purse on the counter. "Very satisfying. Where's Sophie?"
"She left."
Mom sits across from me. Doesn't say anything right away.
"You told her about the timeline," she says finally.
"Yeah."
"And you told her you were thinking about staying."
I look at her. "She told you?"
"No. You have a look, Grant. I've been reading it for forty-three years." She folds her hands. "What did you decide?"
"I don't know."
"Then figure it out. But gently." She stands up. "Sophie has been through enough. She doesn't need someone who's fifty percent sure."
"Everyone keeps telling me what she's been through. Nobody tells me the specifics."
Mom pauses at the doorway, considers me for a long moment, like she's deciding how much is hers to give away.
"That's not my story to tell, son. But I'll say this much — you're not the first Guilligan man to leave that girl standing somewhere wondering if she said something wrong. Don't be the second."
She goes up to bed before I can ask what she means by that.
I sit with my phone after she goes to bed.
Me: I'm sorry. That was unfair. I don't know what I want yet.
Three dots. Disappear. Three dots.
Sophie: Figure it out. Because I can't keep doing this if you're just going to leave anyway.
Me: I know.
Sophie: Let's not waste it on things we can't promise.
Me: Okay.
But it's not okay.
I'm already in too deep to call it okay.