8. Jasmine
JASMINE
Nate’s house had no smell.
That was the first thing Jasmine noticed when the front door swung open and she stepped across the threshold into what would, for the next year, be her home. No smell at all. Her own house smelled of citrus cleaning products, of candle smoke and coffee. This place smelled of nothing.
It felt like walking into a museum.
The house, one of two properties that Nate owned in LA, sprawled across a ridge above the city. It was the kind of beautiful luxury that magazines photographed. Her footsteps rang off the polished floor and came back to her.
A woman appeared from somewhere in the cavernous interior.
Fifties, kind-faced, a lanyard of keys at her hip.
“Ms. Caulfield. I’m Marisol. I run the house.
” She had a warm, dry handshake and eyes that took in Jasmine’s two modest suitcases.
“Is this everything? Mr. Aaron said to bring whatever you need.”
“This is everything.” Jasmine had left the rest at her own house, because bringing it here would have felt like surrender. “Will he be home tonight?”
Something flickered across Marisol’s face.
Jasmine recognized it from years of brushing elbows with the ultra-rich.
The people who worked for men like Nate were good at staying neutral and discreet.
It was most of their job. “He’s usually at his penthouse in the city during the week.
Closer to the office.” She said it lightly, but Jasmine heard the rest of it underneath: he is hardly ever here at all.
“I keep this house ready for him regardless. He likes it ready.”
Jasmine couldn’t say she hated that. He was a man who owned this and lived somewhere else.
She followed Marisol down a long corridor, past rooms that felt like they belonged in the White House — a gallery of art, a dining table for sixteen — to the wing that was hers.
It was, she had to admit, beautiful. A bedroom larger than her first apartment.
A bathroom with a huge claw-foot tub. A private terrace looking down over an infinity pool that ran toward the horizon.
It was also as cold as the rest of the home. After Marisol left her, Jasmine stood in the center of the enormous room and felt something close to grief.
She’d traded her oasis for this. Her courtyard, her fountain, the flowers on the back wall, the lemon tree she never used in time.
All of it left behind for a concrete box on a ridge, for a year, for a hundred million dollars.
It was the right trade. She knew it was the right trade, but that also didn’t stop the ache in her heart.
She would not live like a ghost in someone else’s house. She refused.
So she unpacked. And then, methodically, she set about making the place breathe.
The candles came out first. Fig and tobacco and one that smelled like the inside of a bakery, the small portable comforts she carried everywhere a job sent her.
She lit them along the marble bathroom ledge, along the bedroom windowsill, and the cold light of the room went soft and amber at the edges.
She found a speaker in her bag and filled the silence with the old soul records she and Eden used to play in their shared apartment.
She opened the terrace doors to let the evening in. She poured a glass of wine and took in a deep breath. She could do this.
She was already doing it.
The additions helped. By the time full dark came down over the city below, the bedroom glowed warm and lived-in, and Jasmine sat curled on the terrace with her wine and the music behind her.
She did not let herself wonder where her husband-to-be was tonight. Whose company he was keeping in that glass tower across the city. She did not wonder about it once, she told herself, which was how she knew she was wondering about it constantly.
It was nearly eleven when she heard the front door.
She wasn’t expecting it. Marisol had all but promised he wouldn’t come, and the sound of it carried through the open house, footsteps on concrete. Jasmine set down her wine and felt her whole body brace.
He found her on the terrace.
Nate filled the doorway in a suit gone loose at the collar, tie pocketed, a man at the end of a long day. His gaze moved past her, around her. The candles, the speaker, the wine, the open doors, the evidence of a woman who had moved in and made herself comfortable… and something in his jaw set.
“What’s all this?”
“Candles,” she said. “And music. Two ancient human technologies. I can explain how they work if it’s the first time you’re seeing them.”
“It smells like a …” He searched for it, clearly tired, clearly not in the mood.
“It smells like a hotel lobby in here. The good rugs aren’t meant to have open flames near them.
And the speaker is leaving marks on the stone.
” He picked it up off the marble ledge, turned it over, set it down somewhere else, careful.
“You’ve been here for, what? A few hours? The whole place is… rearranged.”
It wasn’t. She hadn’t even touched anything but her own room.
“The whole place was a tomb.” She stood, because she would not have this conversation sitting down while he loomed.
“No one lives here, Nate. There’s no food in your kitchen.
There’s a dining table for sixteen and not a single thing in this entire house to suggest a human being has ever had a feeling in it.
I lit some candles. I’m not redecorating. I’m trying to be able to breathe.”
“It’s how I like it.”
“It’s not how I like it, and I’m the one who actually has to be here.
” The words came hot, faster than she meant them.
“That was the deal, wasn’t it? I live here.
I perform the loving little wife in public.
So forgive me if, in private, in the one wing that’s contractually mine, I’d like it to smell like something other than the inside of a bank vault. ”
A muscle worked in his cheek. “This is my house,” he said.
“It’s my home now.” She heard how it sounded the instant it left her and lifted her chin rather than take it back. “Temporarily. For a year. But mine. You signed papers that say so. You don’t get the hundred-million-dollar fake marriage and a house that pretends I don’t exist in it. Pick one.”
For a long moment they stood there in the candlelight, the music murmuring on.
Neither of them gave an inch. Two people who had agreed to spend a year convincing the world they were madly in love, already unable to share their space.
Jasmine was aware that this didn’t bode well for the future of their marriage.
“Blow out the candles before you go to sleep,” Nate said finally, words clipped, already turning to go. “The whole hillside’s a fire corridor. I’m not having the house burn down in week one.”
“Good night to you, too.”
“Good night, Jasmine.”
He left. She heard his footsteps recede, heard a door close somewhere far away. She stood alone on the terrace with her heart going hard and the music playing on and the city glittering below.
She was furious. Furious at him. At the cold, beautiful house. At the whole stupid bargain.
She blew out every candle but one.
That one she left burning on the windowsill. She climbed into the enormous unfamiliar bed, pulled the sheets in close around her, and lay there counting down the first of many nights. She knew only one thing: that this was going to be even harder than she’d thought.