Chapter 7
Jasmine
I drive past his building four times before I park.
I’m telling myself it’s recon.
But it’s not recon. It’s a woman trying to talk herself out of the first reckless thing she’s ever done on purpose, and losing.
His truck’s in the lot. The light’s on. The only variable left in the whole equation is me, and I’m the one I trust the least.
He opens the door before I knock. Of course he does.
“You came,” he says, like it surprises him.
“You sound surprised.”
“Little bit.” He steps back to let me in. “Wasn’t sure you’d beat the list.”
“What list?”
“The one in your head giving you reasons not to.”
He’s not wrong, and I hate that he’s not wrong. “It was a long list.”
“Yeah? What won?”
My ridiculous vagina won, but I don’t answer that.
I walk in instead.
The first thing that hits me is the smell.
Garlic, something cooking low, warm. It does not match the apartment I built in my head on the drive over.
That one was bleak. This one is too: three cardboard boxes shoved in a corner like he has no plans to ever open them, a mattress through one door, and one lamp.
But the kitchen is alive. There’s a real knife on the wall.
A pan of something going. A cutting board that’s worn and scratched in the middle.
“You cook?” I ask, surprised.
“I cook.” He goes back to the stove like it’s nothing. “Sit. The counter’s good.”
The counter is too close to him. I take the stool with the wall behind it and a clear view of the door, and he watches me do it and says nothing about it. He slides a glass across instead. Water, no ice.
I look at it. “No ice?”
“You said the sound of it makes you want to climb out of your skin three weeks ago by the trainer’s room.”
“You remembered that?”
“You keep acting like my knack for noticing shit is a magic trick. It’s just paying attention. People do it for stuff they care about.”
I drink the water, but I almost choke on it.
Care about?
Then I see the plates. He’s already made mine up, and the chicken’s on one side, the rice on the other, and the green beans are in their own little bowl. Separate. Nothing touching.
I go still on the stool.
“Caleb.”
“Hm.”
“The beans are in their own bowl.”
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t ask you to do that.”
“I know.” He still doesn’t turn around. “It’s not a thing. Eat.”
“It’s a little bit of a thing.” My voice comes out funny. “People always give me shit for doing that.”
Now he turns around. “Who gave you shit?”
“Everyone.”
He’s quiet for a second. “Well, they’re idiots.” He says it flat, like a fact about the weather. “It’s a bowl, Jasmine. It costs me nothing. Eat your dinner.”
“Where’d you learn to cook?” I ask because I need to put my attention somewhere that isn’t my own throat.
“I’m the oldest of four. Mom worked nights, and so…
” He scrapes the pan. “Somebody had to feed the little ones. You figure out quick, a kid’ll eat just about anything if it’s warm and you don’t make a federal case out of what they will and won’t touch.
” He glances at me. “So the bowl’s not strange to me.
I’ve been keeping food from touching since I was nine. ”
“Do you still? Feed them.”
“Dev’s nineteen, feeds himself now, mostly. The girls, I send what I can.” He says it lightly, but what he shared is heavy as fuck. “That’s why you keep trying. That’s why you need this to work. For them.”
I hold onto that. A guy who plays the way he plays, so two girls he isn’t even in the same state with get to stay little a while longer.
I’m starting to understand him more. He’s more than what his paperwork revealed.
The watching. The way he clocks every exit and every loud thing in a room.
Even the temper that got him thrown out of three states.
I bet he learned to see everything because there were three smaller people who needed him to see it first.
I eat the chicken. I eat the rice. I eat every single green bean out of its own little bowl, and it’s the best meal I’ve had in a long time.
Afterwards, he washes the dishes, and I dry, because standing next to him at a sink turns out to be a thing my nervous system can handle.
“What do you do at home right now?” he asks. “If it’s a normal night around this hour. What’s the routine?”
“Why?”
“Because you’ve checked the clock six times and you’re starting to buzz. I figure that whatever you’d be doing at home is the thing that you need to do here.”
Nobody has ever asked me that, and if somebody ever had, I would have been completely embarrassed. But I don’t know, there’s something about the way he’s asking that makes me feel safe to tell him.
“There’s a show,” I say. “A dating one. Twenty-five men, one woman, she hands out roses.”
“Oh, yeah, I think I heard of that one.”
“I’m late to the hype, but I watch it now. I take notes.”
“Notes?”
“On strategy. They all play it terribly. They lead with their feelings in week two, and they trust the wrong people.” I tell him more.
“It’s the only place I can watch how this stuff actually works, slowed down where I can see the parts.
In real life, it’s too fast or sometimes just too confusing, and I can’t track it.
But on the show, they tell you what they’re thinking.
There’s a little room where they explain it to a camera.
” I look at his face. It’s blank. I can’t read what he’s thinking, so I stop talking. “It’s stupid.”
He’s already walking toward the saddest little couch I’ve ever seen. “Put it on.”
“Are you going to sit on that?”
“Yeah, and so are you.”
“Did you pick that up off the street?”
“Nope,” he laughs. “I got it off of an online marketplace for a steal.”
“I bet.”
He pats the cushion next to him.
“Sit.”
“You don’t have to watch this,” I say.
“Jasmine.” He picks up the remote and holds it out to me grip-first, the way I hand him pens. “I want to know who’s playing the game bad. Walk me through it.”
So I do.
I narrate an entire rose ceremony to a guy who gets his thrills putting people through plexiglass, but he gets it. More importantly, he gets into it. He calls some guy named Brayden a snake forty seconds before Brayden mentions the girlfriend he’s got back home.
“Told you,” I say. “Week one. I had him flagged.”
“You flagged him in week one?”
“It’s his jaw. He smiles with the bottom half of his face only. It’s a tell.”
He looks at me like I just pulled a coin out of his ear. “You’re the scariest person I’ve ever met, Dixon.”
“Thank you.”
“Wasn’t a–”
“Yeah, but I’m taking it as a compliment.”
“Who wins?” he asks. “You already know, don’t you?”
“She picks the wrong one in the finale and the right one at the reunion special. They always do.”
“That’s bleak.”
“It’s data.”
“You ever root for anybody?”
“Sometimes.”
At some point during the show, his arm goes up along the back of the couch behind me. Slow. He leaves me all the room in the world to lean out of it.
But I lean into it instead.
That’s the most reckless thing I do all night, and I do it on purpose, and he goes still for one second like I shocked the shit out of him. Eventually, his hand settles softly on my shoulder, like it’s the most normal thing in the world, and he goes back to yelling at Brayden.
When he kisses me, it’s effortless, his hand coming up to my jaw, turning me slow enough that I could stop it the whole way in if I chose to. But I don’t stop it. I don’t want to.
The kiss gets hotter, his hand in my hair, my fingers in his shirt, the show forgotten and still going, and the heat of it climbs faster than anything I’ve ever felt before.
He’s the one who slows it down. Pulls back, forehead to mine, both of us breathing hard.
“Not tonight,” he says, roughly.
“Why?” It comes out before I can stop it.
“Because I don’t want you to wake up tomorrow and tell yourself the TV was on, one thing led to another, yada yada. Nope.” His thumb moves along my jaw. “When it happens, I want you to have decided it in the daylight and on purpose.”
I close my eyes and consider his words. Not one man on the reality show I watch gives the woman that kind of careful respect. I want to tell him that I have decided, but it makes more sense to wait, because why am I rushing something that I’m not even sure I’m good at.
Kissing is one thing.
But sex?
That’s a whole other ball of terrifying wax.
I drive home at midnight with the window cracked, freezing on purpose, but it doesn’t help clear my head. I take notes on other people’s mistakes for fun, so I should know one when I’m making one. But there’s no note for this, no tell I missed or strategy I’d flag.
I’m not falling for Caleb Adams, I tell myself.
But the little human lie detector part of me already knows that ship has sailed.
Now I just have to decide how deep I’m going to allow myself to fall.