CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
It may be a cliché—the romance heroine draped over the hero in bed, wrapped up in sheets and probably having just whispered wow—but I don’t care. I’ve lost my grasp on time and place, on fiction and reality and everything in between.
All my mental real estate is devoted to how good it feels, being here with Grant, and how unthinkable it is that we didn’t end up here sooner—his pulse beating warm under my fingers, his fingertips trailing idly up and down my arm, until he lifts my hand and looks it over.
“Say what you will about Zach Beaumont,” he says, eyeing the gargantuan diamond still adorning my finger. “I bet all the jewelers love him.”
I groan at the eyesore, twisting it off my finger to throw it across the room.
“And Savannah could pitch for the Red Sox,” Grant adds.
I settle back against him with a contented sigh. “Not my first rodeo, believe it or not. In third grade, Brock Kowalski proposed to me with a Ring Pop. I threw it at his head.”
“Yeah, I can’t see you with a Brock. It sounds like you made the right call.”
“I know. It was the proposal rejection every little girl dreams of.”
Grant takes my hand, lazily entwining our fingers. Without the diamond monstrosity, I’m left only with a thin gold band to match the one he still has on.
It’s strange, I think, seeing our hands together. I don’t hate it—the little slip of gold we each wear, marking us as a pair. Funny how the fictional version of something can be so sweet when the reality gives me hives.
“So,” Grant says, kissing my shoulder, “now that we’ve crossed over into your genre of expertise, what do you think happens next?”
“Honestly?” I blow out a deeply thoughtful breath. “Just smut, I hope. No more plot. Only pornography.”
His laugh rumbles through me. “No arguments here.”
“With occasional breaks for late-night walks and dinner.”
“And tourism,” he adds. “All this time in London and so many sights still unseen. I expect a full chapter of us riding the London Eye.”
“And you calling out misinformation at the British Museum.”
“And you trying in vain to make the royal guards laugh.”
“Now, that’s where you’re deluding yourself,” I say. “I would break them.”
He smiles, and it’s a moment I wish I could pause just to live in it a little longer. All these moments, actually—these little scenarios we’re inventing, just me and Grant doing ordinary things, with no plot structure to adhere to. It’s a nice thought and makes me ache a little.
Grant angles toward me, propping his head on his arm. “You think we ever would have met in real life? If it weren’t for the book, I mean. If things were different.”
I think about it. If our normal lives were real life; both of us going about our daily business on the same plane of existence. Just a few miles apart at any given moment, completely unaware of each other.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I guess we never really ran in the same circles.”
“Yeah. Not a lot of overlap between ass-kicking thrill seekers and faculty trivia teams.”
It’s not just that, I know. If we did have some chance encounter, I suspect that’s where it would have ended. I’d never have let myself get so close to him.
It’s a sad alternate reality to consider.
“It would have been a shame,” I say. “Not to know you. I would have been missing out.”
He smiles. “Me too.”
“And maybe it’s for the best, that it all happened the way it did,” I say. “Even if things were different, if we did cross paths, we wouldn’t have had such a great meet-cute.”
Grant eyes me dubiously. “Would we call that a meet-cute?”
“Of course,” I say. “Boy calls Uber, girl steals Uber, boy’s life flashes before his eyes and he scream-narrates the whole thing. Classic meet-cute.”
“I’d call it more of a meet-horrifying.”
“Well, it was a meet-cool, at least.”
“All right, a meet-cool,” he concedes.
There’s no way around it now; this is going to hurt when it’s over. But I can’t think about that. I’ve made my bed, and Grant and I have messed it all up again, and right now I’m thinking a hopeless tangle of sheets is a nice place to be, if it’s with him.
And at least there’s an element of certainty.
This may have to end when the book does, but it’s a romance; he isn’t going to just stop liking me.
We aren’t going to slowly drift apart until we don’t recognize each other anymore.
We’ll be happy until the end, and then it’ll be one clean break rather than a thousand tiny cracks.
He rests a hand on my arm, sweeping his thumb in mindless crescents over my skin, and all thoughts of plot and story arc evaporate from my mind.
Love interest, romance hero, book boyfriend—all those titles fade away, leaving only Grant behind.
Grant, whose touch sets my blood shimmering like oil in a hot pan.
Who I could talk to about anything. He makes me wonder why we refer to romance as more than friendship, when the two can coexist so beautifully in the same person.
“Tell me about your life before,” I say.
He makes a face. “It wasn’t real,” he says. “It doesn’t matter now.”
“Yes, it does,” I say. “If it was real to you, it’s real to me. I want to know things about you.”
A small smile tugs at his mouth, and he exhales any remaining protest. “What do you have in mind?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe how you became a champion sword fighter and why you didn’t tell me before?”
Groaning, he buries his head in his pillow. I smack him with mine. “Grant, come on!”
“I’m hardly a champion,” he says, muffled. “If anything I’m pretty rusty. It’s just that Alistair kind of sucks.”
“Enough with the false modesty, Captain Hook. You were positively swashbuckling.”
He turns his head just enough to fix one narrowed eye on me. “Captain Hook? That’s who you’re going with? I mean, you could at least say Jack Sparrow.”
“No. You’re not an eyeliner kind of guy.”
“I’m a hook-hand kind of guy, though?”
“Come on,” I say. “How did you learn to fight like that? You have to tell me or I’ll assume the worst, like that you’re an actual pirate. Or a serial killer, like Alistair. Or a witch cursed you with an anachronistic talent, or—”
“Fine,” he says, raising up on his elbows with that trying-not-to-smile look. He hesitates just a moment, like he’s already regretting what he’s about to tell me. “I got into it via LARPing in high school. Are you happy?”
I can’t speak at first. The delight is all-consuming.
“Grant,” I say. “I am so, so happy.” I picture him as a scrawny teen, decked out in soda-tab chain mail and cardboard weaponry, and it’s impossible not to giggle with joy. He face-plants back into his pillow. “Wow, LARPing. I just figured you were on the fencing team or something.”
He’s silent for a moment. “Yeah,” he says slowly. “That … would’ve been a really normal alternative explanation.”
“Who wants normal? I want to hear about LARPing.” I turn onto my stomach, my feet kicked up behind me, and nudge him to roll over. “What was it like being a LARPer? Were you the LARPest kid in school?”
He sighs heavily, facing me. “First of all, LARP is a noun or a verb. Which I know you know, because you said it right at first.”
“LARPdammit,” I say, snapping my fingers in mock irritation. He cracks a smile. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because,” he says. “It’s nerdy. It’s not exactly the stuff of crime-thriller heroes.”
“Okay,” I say. “Leaving aside, for a moment, the fact that your nerdiness saved our lives and that being passionate about something is the sexiest thing in the world. Why would you be ashamed of being a nerd? This isn’t the nineties. Nerds are basically the cool kids now.”
“Tell that to my dad,” he says. He’s quiet for a moment, then gives a faint harrumph of a laugh.
“Hey, there’s one nice thing. If he never existed, I guess he’s not technically dead anymore.
” He flashes me a sardonic look, and I just wait until he’s ready to go on.
After a moment, his eyes drop and he becomes very interested in the hem of his pillowcase.
“I think I embarrassed him,” he finally says, pulling at a rogue thread. “He wanted a football son and he got one who spent his weekends running around the woods with his friends, looking like low-budget extras from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”
“Which I imagine was pretty low-budget to begin with,” I point out.
“Exactly.” For a moment, there’s a fond glimmer of nostalgia in his eyes, but it quickly fades.
“My dad and I were just too different. I wasn’t cut out to be who he wanted me to be.
But things didn’t get really bad between us until I told him I was going to grad school instead of joining him at the store.
” He lets out a weighty breath. “That fucking store.”
“What happened?” I ask gently.
“Well, for background, it used to be called Hoffman and Sons,” he says.
“Which is a lot to unpack, given that he named it that before any of us were born. And that he ended up having a daughter, too. But he expected us—me and Ted, specifically—to follow in his footsteps. In his eyes, you weren’t really a man unless you had a passion for knowing every kind of screwdriver and their full government names. ”
“Well, that’s kind of ridiculous,” I say. “All you really need to know is this is the flat one, this is the crisscrossy one.”
“Thank you,” he says. “Anyway, when I called to tell him about grad school, he was quiet for a minute. And then he said, All right, then, and hung up. The next time I went home, he’d painted over the sign to say Hoffman and Son.