Chapter Fourteen
“Where’s Merritt?”
Whit looked up from the pot of mulled wine. Willa was leaning on the counter in her impeccable Whitney Houston costume. Behind
her, a woman in a devil suit chatted with a man who was dressed as either Jennifer Lopez or someone from Drag Race, or perhaps both.
“She’s on the porch, recovering from an Ian Hoult encounter.”
He set his jaw to keep from elaborating on his suspicions.
Willa made a not-surprised face, then said, “It’s pretty cold out there.”
“I’m bringing her a hot beverage.”
He looked at Willa, who nodded and then waited.
Whit set two full mugs on the white countertop.
Willa was still waiting.
“What?” he said with an impatient sigh.
She raised her eyebrows. Whit lowered his.
“What are you trying to say?”
“I’m not saying anything.”
“But you are.”
“Whit, you’ve been grinning like the Cheshire Cat from the time you opened my front door all the way until you had to speak
with my worst-ever party guest.”
He bit his lip now at what felt like a smile threatening to return. Willa was right. He’d been grinning since he got here,
but his brain hadn’t yet worked out why. With some effort, he forced his face into something neutral.
“Oh, Whit,” Willa said. She shrugged. “You should probably go check on her.”
Willa gave him a closed-mouth smile, and as she turned to speak to the man with enormous fake breasts, something happened
in Whit’s brain. It was like ice shifting in a cocktail glass or a log settling in the fireplace.
Oh, Whit.
Merritt was sitting on the steps, her coat tucked beneath her to form a barrier between the frigid stone and her body. The
cold front was blowing in at full force, making her hair whiz around her head. Who knew where the top hat had gone. Her breath
puffed out before her, making her yearn for a cigarette, a feeling she immediately found repulsive because she had only ever
smoked with Graydon.
He fucks his grad students.
The words were dehumanizing, yes, but it was more than that. It was that people, even this man Ian Hoult, thousands of miles
away, seemed to know and be disgusted by this fact. It was that she was just one of the grad students, one face in a series
of who knew how many. She knew this, she had known this, had learned this was his pattern. None of it was a surprise . . .
and yet. He fucks his grad students.
How long would she feel this way? It wasn’t as if she was sitting around grieving.
She wouldn’t even describe what she was feeling as missing him, now that she knew what he was.
Graydon Lyons had been endlessly captivating, and he had made her feel smart and interesting.
She had seen things with him—the world behind the curtain that separated writers like him from everyone else—and she had loved that.
She had loved him. But Graydon Lyons was also a miserable, emotionally stunted narcissist, and she was glad to be free of him.
No, what she felt was some mixture of shame and self-loathing. If people knew she was not only one of the grad students but
also the grad student from the book . . . God, she could die. She no longer felt that her stomach was going to expel its contents
but just the opposite—as if her stomach were a great, yawning ravine she herself was in danger of falling into.
“Hi.”
She turned to look at Whit, framed by the glowing white shape of the house behind him and the dangling café-style bulbs above.
The mugs in his hands were overflowing with steam, and she took one gladly as he lowered himself to sit by her on the steps.
“Jeez, it got cold.”
“Oh. Yeah.” Merritt took a heartening sip.
She looked at Whit, who seemed tentative, careful. Was he embarrassed, too, now that he had figured her out? She was almost
certain he had figured it out.
“It’s me.”
Saying it felt like passing a kidney stone. She had to get it out.
Merritt turned her head from Whit to stare across the shadowy yard as she spoke.
“The Graydon Lyons book. It’s about me.”
She felt him waiting next to her.
“You knew, didn’t you?”
Whit shifted positions. “I had an inkling. With where you went to school and that stuff about the bad breakup. And then when
Ian brought it up, I could just tell . . .”
Merritt threw her head back.
“I’m in hell.”
Whit laughed, the barest wisp of something compassionate escaping through his nose.
“Only I could tell, I promise.”
She looked at him then, and he gave her a gentle smile whose meaning was illegible.
He fucks his grad students.
“Well,” she sighed, “that’s good, I guess. God, that Ian man is annoying.”
“A wretched human being,” Whit agreed. “These days, at least. We used to be friends, and he used to be all right. A little
snooty, but in a funny way, and it didn’t matter as much because he didn’t have the fame to back it up. It’s harder to overlook
haughtiness when there’s an actual reason for it.”
He scanned the darkness in front of them. Was he being respectful? Avoiding her glance? Was he worried he’d catch some sort
of disease from her?
Oh, she was embarrassed. He was embarrassed, too, it seemed. She gripped the warm mug in her hands, a lifeline, and then said
the horrible thing out loud.
“We weren’t just fucking.” She winced. “I hate when people use that word like that. But that’s not what it was. We were in love. Or I was at least. God.”
She winced again.
“That sounds pathetic. He would probably say I threw myself at him or something, when really, he went after me.”
She was saying too much. She looked at Whit and immediately found she could not bear the weight of his soft, sweet glare.
“I just mean, it meant something to me, and then I realized what I was becoming when I was around him, and so I ended it.”
Merritt had not actually told anyone this. People seemed to assume Graydon had broken things off with her, and she had been
so desperate to put it all behind her that she hadn’t bothered to correct them. What did it matter in the end? They were done.
She was out of his life. But now this book had dragged her back in.
“I ended things because I didn’t want to be the person he was turning me into.
” She was repeating herself. “He was this magnanimous man, invested in me and my career, and he would say things about the importance of women’s voices and my voice in particular, but it was all hollow.
He just wanted me around and said what he needed to keep me there. ”
Rambling, she thought, you’re rambling.
“And then he went and did this.”
Merritt raised her hands, at a loss.
Whit looked at her then. She watched his white teeth push into his now-beardless lower lip, and she was struck by the thickness
of his mustache, the fullness of his lips and eyebrows.
“Merritt,” he said at last, and her name coming from his mouth was like a bell piercing the silence of a church service. He
pulled her mug from her grasp—her emotional support mug!—and set it on his other side. Then he turned on the step so that
his knees touched hers, and her hands, which felt like they were flailing wildly, looking for something to grasp, were taken
into his.
“You don’t have to explain yourself.”
The words did not immediately compute.
“Yes, I do,” she said. “Ian said that—”
“Ian is one of the most socially inept people you’ll ever meet. Nothing he says should be taken seriously.”
Merritt’s heart was pounding; she felt the places his skin touched hers with a sharp keenness, as though her other senses
had dulled themselves to focus her energy on only those points of contact. It was really getting cold, but their fingers folded
over one another like tiny cords of warmth.
She found herself speaking without really meaning to.
“But he was right, Whit. Apparently, this is just something Graydon does with people like me, and I was too stupid to realize—”
“Why are you defending him?”
“I’m not defending anyone, I’m just—”
“Putting yourself down?”
She pulled her hands from his to push her fingers through her hair.
“I don’t know, Whit. It’s just . . . he . . .”
Whit reached up for her hands again and pulled them down, slowly and carefully.
“So the book is about you,” he said, all frankness.
“Yes. I think so.”
Merritt felt her head dip low, pulled by shame. It hurt to hear him say it.
Whit’s hands slipped from hers—God, he felt the shame, too—but then he leaned forward slightly, so he could look her directly
in the eye. “Who gives a shit.”
He enunciated each word so that they sounded like pebbles dropped one after another.
“That’s easy for you to say.” Merritt said this, not because she necessarily believed it, but because his face was close to
hers and the heat from his body was palpable, a blanket of Whit-ness, and she needed to speak to avoid complete brain shutdown.
“It is easy, you’re right,” he said, still looking at her head-on.
She felt his leg push against hers. Her hands were back in his.
“But it’s also the truth. Ian Hoult is a bonehead, and Graydon Lyons sounds like a real dick. He took your private life—the
life you trusted him with—and made it into some lurid story that he knew would get him attention? Whatever. That’s ruthless,
Merritt. It’s gross.”
Finally, finally, Whit moved a few inches away, relinquishing her hands in the process. She found her entire torso turned his way, all on
its own.
“But it doesn’t say anything about you, because you are . . .”
And here at last the confidence he’d been pulsing with seemed to falter.
“You’re . . .” he said again, and Merritt realized that their faces were closer together than they had been before. She could smell the wine on his breath, and beneath that, the old-fashioneds he’d had earlier, and beneath that, something like cedar and mint.
The idea returned to her with force that perhaps this night was something more than the casual, low-key thing she’d convinced herself it was. Whit’s river stone eyes were heavy with emotion