4. Jasmine
JASMINE
“You have your ‘I’d rather be dead’ face on,” Eden said, reaching across the back of the car to fix a flyaway strand of Jasmine’s hair. “We’re going to need to do something about that before the carpet.”
Jasmine stuck out her tongue. “This is my festive face.”
“No, it’s your hostage face. I’ve seen your festive face. They’re not even cousins.”
Jasmine laughed despite herself, and that was the whole reason she’d called Eden, the whole reason she’d insisted on bringing her tonight when she could have come alone.
They’d shared a tiny apartment, an electric bill, secrets, and a decade of disasters, and somewhere in there Eden had become the one person on earth who never wanted anything from Jasmine except her actual company.
She still went to the same open calls she always had.
Took the same commercial gigs. Lived in the same kind of apartment they’d once shared.
She had never once let Jasmine’s rise put any distance between them.
And even though Jasmine helped her out wherever she could — suggesting her for parts, helping with rent in the hard months, footing the bill for their yearly girls’ trip — she knew that Eden loved her for who she was. Not what she could do for her.
Which was rare in a world like theirs.
The car slid down toward the restaurant opening, the traffic a flurry of beeps and headlights through the tinted glass.
Jasmine’s whole body ached. The fitting that afternoon had wrung her out.
The backless, bronze silk dress had felt like armor when she’d zipped into it, and it felt like a costume now.
Everything felt like a costume since yesterday.
Since Dr. Axline had given her the brutal truth. No cure, just management.
“I don’t want to go,” she admitted to Eden.
Eden’s teasing dropped away at once. “Then we don’t. Just say the word. I’ll tell the driver to take us for tacos, and we’ll watch something terrible in our sweatpants.”
For a moment Jasmine almost said yes. But she thought of the industry trades, the columns, the hundred small ways a town like this forgot you the instant you stopped insisting that it remember.
An actress who disappeared was an actress forgotten about, and there would always be a thousand more people behind her, ready to take her place. If you weren’t hot, you were nothing.
“I have to be seen,” she said. “Healthy. Thriving. Booked and busy.”
“You are booked and busy, and fibromyalgia isn’t stealing your health. It’s just… changing it. Life has different expectations now.”
Jasmine squared her shoulders. The ache in her hips protested. She ignored it, because ignoring it was a skill she was going to have to master, and fast. “Okay. Festive face. Watch.”
She turned it on.
The restaurant rose up out of the West Hollywood dusk in a blaze of white awnings and smiling faces.
It was the new darling of the moment, a place that had been a parking lot eight months ago and was now the only address that mattered for exactly as long as the city’s attention held.
A gray carpet ran from the curb to a set of double doors.
Behind the velvet rope stood a wall of photographers three deep.
Publicists with clipboards and headsets ran the whole machine.
Carlos, the bodyguard who worked events for Jasmine, came around from the front of the car and opened her door.
The noise rushed in, photographers and fans shouting her name, and she stepped out into the lights with a smile that gave away nothing.
That smile had bought her mother a home and would, God willing, keep paying for it.
She worked the line the way she’d taught herself to.
Chin down a fraction, then up. Hand on the hip, weight on the back foot, an angle that was flattering.
A reporter asked who she was wearing, and Jasmine named the designer and gave a little twirl that sent the bronze silk catching the light.
The reporter beamed. She told the next one she was, “so excited about what’s coming, can’t say a word yet,” which was the truth dressed up as a tease.
The air smelled of perfume and cigarette smoke and stale urine. That was Hollywood. Pretty in the pictures, but the reality underneath was just another dirty city.
Somewhere past the rope, a publicist barked a name into a headset. Eden hovered just off-carpet, holding her clutch, giving Jasmine an encouraging smile whenever their eyes met.
It cost her. Each pose pulled at something that didn’t want to be pulled. Her lower back had begun to ache in a thin, steady line that she smiled straight through. Two more minutes, she told herself. Two minutes of this and then the dim interior and a chair and a glass of something cold.
She turned to give the long lenses one last look down the carpet.
And her heart leaped.
That man, he looked so familiar. Just like…
Sandy hair, gone a shade darker than she remembered.
The same unfair height. Six years older and somehow more himself, filling out a dark suit like it had been made for him.
For one absurd instant she was twenty-four again, broke and bright-eyed and stupid with hope, watching this exact man cross a room toward her.
Then the rest of the story came rushing back in, and her stomach dropped.
Nate Aaron was here. Tonight, of all the nights, when she had nothing left to give.
She had never entirely stopped thinking of him.
You didn’t fully evict someone who had once made you feel like the most interesting person alive.
Some piece of him had stayed under her skin for six years, surfacing at the worst, most private hours.
But wrapped around that, inseparable from it, was the memory of a candlelit table and a chair across from her that stayed empty all night.
Even worse was the shame of being made to feel small by a man who had simply forgotten she existed.
He’d been someone back then, an up-and-comer in the tech world, already a multi-millionaire. And she was no one except an aspiring actress from Arizona. They’d met at a wedding; she’d been one of the catering staff, and she’d been shocked speechless when he asked her out.
Back then, she thought herself the luckiest girl in the world.
He was coming toward her now. Of course he was. Worse was that he wore that easy, confident look on his face that made her want to punch him.
“Jasmine.” He said her name like he was savoring it. “You look—”
“No.”
It came out flat and quiet and absolutely final. She kept the festive face on for the cameras, kept her body angled and pleasant, and let only her eyes do the cutting.
He stalled. The charm flickered. “I just thought—”
“I don’t know what you thought.” Still smiling. Still gorgeous for the lenses. Her voice pitched low enough that the noise of the carpet swallowed it before it reached anyone but him. “I genuinely can’t imagine. But whatever it is, the answer’s no, and you’re standing in my light.”
A muscle moved in his jaw. Good. He should feel rejected. Let him feel, for one second, a fraction of what it was to be caught flat-footed and humiliated with no warning at all.
“It’s been six years,” he said, lower now, almost gentle, and that was somehow worse than if he’d been smug. “I was hoping we could—”
“It’s been a long day, Nate.” She hated how natural his name still felt in her mouth. “And you don’t get to be the thing that makes it longer. We don’t know each other anymore. We barely did then.”
She turned before he could answer and walked toward the brass doors on legs that screamed and a spine held perfectly straight. Eden materialized at her side, slipping Jasmine’s clutch back into her hand, eyes enormous.
“Was that,” Eden whispered. “Was that who I think it was?”
“It was nobody,” Jasmine said.
But her pulse was hammering, and her palms had gone damp inside her gloves. And the worst part, the part she wouldn’t tell Eden, was that beneath the anger, beneath the exhaustion, some small idiotic part of her was still humming from the half-second before she remembered to hate him.
She stepped into the cool dark of the restaurant, let the doors swing shut on the lights and the noise behind her, and breathed.
“Tell me there’s a bar,” she said.
“There is absolutely a bar,” said Eden, steering her toward it. “And you’re going to tell me everything.”