Page 85 of Anatomy of a Meet Cute
Her roommates exchanged heavy glances, then turned back to her. Jehan winced, then broke down and finally mouthed, “Grant.”
Her friend’s voice was barely a whisper, but she might as well have screamed in Sam’s face. Heat washed over her as roughly one million conflicting thoughts collided and tried to override the circuitry in her brain. “I don’t ... that doesn’t make sense. Are you sure?”
“Sherilynn was very clear. I even asked if they meant that Grant had received an email about the report. But no. He turned it in.”
“But why?” Sam said, her voice going hoarse with panic. She had been so rude to him. But of course he’d still managed to fix all this. Why on earth would someone with so much going for him waste his time doing something like that for her? Surely his reputation could have waited forty-eight hours for her to solve the problem.
“Sherilynn didn’t say. But if I had to guess ...” Duke paused and shrugged his shoulders forward. When Sam didn’t respond to the gesture, he opened both palms toward her and said, “You know.”
“You think I guilted him into it? That was not the intention of that speech,” Sam hissed.
“Not guilt,” Jehan said, gently reaching up to set her hand on Sam’s shoulder. “Grant’s love language isn’t words. It’s service. Think about it.”
Bits and pieces of Grant’s actions slowly began to click into place. Agreeing to be the birthing center’s adviser even when she’d lost the game, driving her around to look at venues, remembering her ice cream preferences. Those weren’t the kind of things someone did when they were casually interested. Friends didn’t put energy into talking their way into a building for her. Certainly, someone who needed her to be perfect wouldn’t write a report for her. Only someone who cared about her would do that ...
“Oh God. I’m such a fool.” Sam’s skin felt clammy, even though she was too warm.
“I thinkimpulsivesounds nicer thanfoolish,” Duke said, as if the semantics would soften the blow. He’d told her to apologize to Grant and hadn’t even had to wait two full days to be proved right. She should have apologized. Instead, she was stubborn. And now she had this glaring chasm of an error in judgment standing in front of her. Anjo hadn’t shown up because Duke had made promises. They’d shown up because Grant had given them everything they needed.
Sam glanced up just in time to see Grant smiling at Dr.Franklin and Kaiya, who were walking toward the podium. The realization that any second now the event could start and she would be stuck sitting just a few chairs away from Grant, looking like a coldhearted jerk, hit her like a truck speeding down an empty street. “I have to say something.”
“Better make it quick. The event starts soon,” Jehan said, nodding at the podium, where Duesa, Dr.Franklin, and Kaiya were already standing. “Good luck.”
“Right. Thank you both,” Sam said, wiping her palms on her pants as she glanced in Grant’s direction again.
“Go get ’em,” Duke said.
Sam was almost positive she was going to need more than luck to fix this. Even if Grant’s love language was service, it was very possible to love someone and let them go. For all she knew, turning in the report was his way of saying he’d never let go before prying her off the edge of a nice big door so she could sink to the bottom of the ocean like Jack inTitanic.
Grant had every right to let her go. After all, she’d behaved horrifically. Made all kinds of terrible assumptions based on her own trauma and not what was standing steady before her. She hadn’t even tried to think of things from his perspective. The poor guy had basically gone out on a limb for her, carted her around town, backed her up at every turn, and then committed the unconscionable sin of bad timing.
That was it. That was all it had taken for Sam to throw everything she knew about his character out the window and start them back at square one. How dense was she? And would Grant even want to give someone that stupid a second chance? She clearly wasn’t about to make room on the door for him when the tables were turned and—
Grant finished his conversation with a very pregnant person and looked up, knocking Sam out of her spiral. Without thinking, she closed the remaining ten-foot gap between them before he had time to slip off. Reaching a hand out, she touched his forearm and said the first thing she could think to say. “If you are letting go, can we talk first?”
“What?” Grant said, his eyebrows shooting up as if he thought Sam might have had one glass of Martinelli’s too many.
“I ...” Sam gave her head a shake, hoping to rattle more useful words loose. “What I mean—”
“Hello! Hello!”
Kaiya’s voice rang out from the podium, causing both of them to jump with surprise. In Sam’s mind, she’d thought she’d at least get the wordsI was wrongout of her mouth. Instead, all she had managed was a contextlessTitanicreference and mounting regret. The room began to shift toward their seats, and she felt her hand tighten around Grant’s forearm. She needed to speak fast. “I know about the report. You were just trying to be helpful, not judgy. You have every right to be mad, and I can understand if you need to—”
“If you can all take your seats, we’ll get started,” Kaiya said, her gaze landing pointedly on the two of them. Sam felt her panic spike sky-high as she belatedly remembered that she had labeled their chairs on opposite sides of the podium to avoid having to sit near him. The act was so petty it was almost comical now.
Releasing Grant’s arm, she said, “Maybe we can talk about it later? I’ll let you decide. Okay, bye.”
“Yeah—” Grant’s expression was inscrutable as the lights in the room dimmed and the video the two of them had shot only days before began playing on the wall above the podium. Grant looked at Sam hard, his lips pressed together in a thin line, then turned and hustled over to his chair without another word.
For a moment, Sam simply stood there, the absence of Grant’s words ringing in her ears as a giant version of herself started to speak. Something about seeing her own face on camera, even with Bebe’s excellent makeup job, forced her to move to her chair.
Sam tried to pay attention to the event. After all, this was a celebration of the hard work that she had put into the birthing center. At some point, she would need to get up and thank everyone. But it wasalmost impossible to focus, knowing that Grant was all of ten feet away and she still had no idea what he was thinking.
And she might never know, she reminded herself. Grant had every right to keep his thoughts to himself. She had said as much when she’d launched her mess of an apology at him. Looking back on it, she wasn’t even sure the wordsI’m sorryhad come out of her mouth. Hopefully, he wanted to speak to her. If it ended like this, Sam wasn’t sure she could ever get over letting him go.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Sam sipped her glass of champagne and tried to smile as one of her mother’s oldest friends began showing her a patch of skin. This was one of the hazards of being a doctor. Suddenly everyone wanted her to look at their moles and tell them if they were going to die. No amount ofI’m not a dermatologistcould preempt it, so Sam had taken to letting people finish before saying, “Aunt Marilyn, you’re likely fine, but you should go to your dermatologist, just to be safe.”
