Page 77 of Anatomy of a Meet Cute
Grant watched her like a teacher waiting for a group of second graders to get quiet, the I’ll-wait expression plain as day on his face.Finally, Sam took a deep breath. “I’m so sorry. I got busy and I just ...” Sam looked around and shrugged as she tried to find a word that felt more accurate thanforgot.
“The thing is, when I asked you if you needed any help, you said you were on it. And I took you at your word. But I just got an email saying the progress report hasn’t been submitted. Since I’m the administrative adviser for the program, I’m at fault if we lose our funding. This program could get shut down.”
“I know, and I can’t stress enough that I’m sorry,” Sam said, feeling her shoulders sinking with each word. “I just got busy, but I’ll—”
“Sam, this isn’t the kind of thing you can just forget and have it be okay. Being a researcher means being responsible for your own funding.” Grant ran a hand down the back of his neck, his voice tight with frustration.
“I didn’t ‘just forget’ it. With the exception of a few days at your house, I’ve spent the last week jumping from emergency to emergency.” Sam clenched her jaw. She knew she’d let him down, but it wasn’t like Anjo was the NIH. They were a few hours late, not six weeks.
“Why didn’t you just say you needed help at my place?” Grant said, his hands falling to his sides with a noisy thud. “We could have written it together.”
“Because I wanted to avoid this,” Sam said, gesturing between the two of them. “I feel like I’m constantly swimming around with sharks just waiting for me to fail. Between you, Dr.Franklin, and my mother, I’m basically drowning in other people’s doubts and expectations—”
“What expectations? I’m not being unreasonable here.” Grant cut her off, the volume of his voice rising. Gesturing at her with both hands, he added, “You said you could do it. Is believing you were capable of something an outrageous concept?”
For a moment, Sam struggled to find words to explain herself. Someone like him never overextended himself. He could just glide through life with all the right words and charisma to match. He’d never overcommit just to prove himself. It was the perk of being perfect.
“I’m not saying you are unreasonable.” Trying her best to find the words she needed to explain herself, Sam gritted her teeth and said, “What I’m saying is that it isn’t easy to ask for help. I know that has to be hard for you to understand.”
“Why wouldn’t I get it?” Grant narrowed his eyes. “No one likes asking for help, but we do it when things like our funding are on the line. When you came to me with this idea, I told you this was going to happen, that you were taking on too much. I literally said you don’t have time for this, and I was right.”
“Look. I am tired and I am dirty. Can you please let this go?” Sam asked, the tension in her voice palpable as she glared at Grant. By his own admission, he knew now was a bad time, so maybe he could just cut her an ounce of slack and drop it.
“This is something that has to get fixed, like, twelve hours ago. So no. I can’t let it go,” Grant said, each of his words sounding clipped. “Moreover, this is your reality, so even if I did, are we going to have this conversation every month?”
Frustration welled up in Sam’s chest. There was no way that she could make Grant understand this. She’d walked enough tightropes to recognize that getting involved with someone whose experience with imperfection was losing a sock in the laundry was bound to end this way. “I get it. You were right. I failed. But does it really seem like an I-told-you-so is helpful right now?”
Grant’s eyebrows shot toward his hairline. “When would be a helpful time? Because it seems like that would have been a few months ago, when I said it originally.”
“Maybe your stupid I-told-you-so is the reason I didn’t ask you for help in the first place. Did it ever even occur to you that I might have asked for help if I didn’t have to constantly second-guess whether talking to you was going to come back to bite me in the ass?” Grant’s jaw dropped open, but Sam was riled up now. If she was going to burn a bridge, she was going to do it so thoroughly and completely that even the ashes would be unrecognizable.
“I’ll call and offer a groveling apology tomorrow so your precious reputation isn’t dinged. As for us, I think we can acknowledge that our relationship was an unmitigated disaster. Surprise! I can’t meet your standards of perfection. And I don’t even want to try. Living with judgment and an I-told-you-so hanging over my head just isn’t going to work for me.”
Sam’s heartbeat felt like a kick drum in her chest, slowly keeping track of the silence between them. Even the ancient coffee machine seemed to have stopped wheezing just in time for her to vent at Grant. From where she stood, Sam was close enough that she could see Grant’s otherwise lovely face contort with something that looked suspiciously like hurt. The less spiteful part of Sam’s brain tried to suggest that maybe she had gone too far, but Sam was determined not to hear it. Whatever it had to say could be said at home, where she could cry off the rest of Bebe’s stupid makeup.
She watched as Grant schooled his features and took a shallow breath. “Listen, Sam—”
“Nope.” Something inside her snapped. Whatever was coming, she had no intention of sticking around to hear it. He could send her a nasty email or leave a bunch of shitty voice mails like her mother for all she cared. “You know what? I’m taking your advice for the second time today.” Sam looked at him squarely and gestured to herself, then to him and said, “Boundary.”
With that, she went for the door, letting a combination of her rage and exhaustion carry her to the elevators and down to the lobby. Thatanger kept her company while she waited for her rideshare and all the way to her front door. It was only as she got out of the car that she let herself think about the day. Somehow she had gone from the extreme high of saving two lives to having fought with her boyfriend and her mother, both of whom she still had to see at some point in her future and neither of whom she knew what to do with. Worse still, her favorite ice cream was gone.
Chapter Twenty-One
Sam felt like dirt. But, she reasoned, that could be because she was probably sitting on some dirt. When she had come home, she’d spent a good hour on the couch crying every single moment of the last twenty-six hours out of her system. At some point, she’d cried herself to sleep only to wake up hungry and ready to cry again. In an effort to find some spot of happiness, she had pulled it together long enough for her to make it to the freezer for Duke’s replacement ice cream and a spoon. Afraid that she would cry-sleep again, she decided to sit on the floor crisscross applesauce, where she hoped the hardwood would prevent her from repeating her own history.
Swallowing back a sob, she stabbed at the block of still-very-frozen ice cream, which didn’t budge. “Can’t you just help me out here?”
The sound of a key in the door stopped her cold in the early stages of another catastrophic meltdown. For the span of one breath, she considered trying to dive onto the couch to save face, until Jehan’s head popped around the corner.
“Sam. Did you get my text?” Jehan asked, looking down as she tried to slip off her shiny silver tennis shoes.
Sam glanced over her shoulder to where her phone was stuffed between the couch cushions, just to be sure that neither her mother nor Grant could reach her, even if they tried. Which, as far as she knew, they hadn’t.
“No. I put away my phone. What happened?”
“Well ...” Jehan fiddled with the laces of her shoe for far longer than someone with three master’s degrees, a PhD, and some of the best fine motor skills in the medical world needed to untie a simple knot, then said, “Trav and I broke up.”
“What?” Sam said, her voice lurching dangerously close to shrieking territory.
