10. Nate
NATE
“You need anything?” Nate arched an eyebrow as Jasmine, who hadn’t stopped fidgeting with her dress since she’d arrived at his back patio ten minutes earlier.
“No.” She frowned.
“Does this have anything to do with your audition yesterday?” he asked, not really caring, his attention drifting to the sparkling infinity pool.
He was busy thinking about tomorrow’s work schedule and didn’t have time for Jasmine’s moodiness, but if a simple concerned question would chill her out, that would be wonderful.
She was quiet. So quiet that he looked over at her.
She was staring at the lawn. “It went… well.”
He suspected there was more to the story, but if she didn’t feel like giving it up, he certainly wouldn’t pry. Nothing in their contract said that they needed to be friends, and even though he held nothing against her, she clearly hated him.
No, he decided. Better to just give her space and steer clear of her as much as possible. Luckily, he was busy enough as it was, and they only had to make a couple appearances together each week.
“You know,” he said, “you’re going to have to look happy once the photographer gets here.”
Her scowl only deepened. “I understand that, but she’s not here yet, is she?”
“My PR agent is,” he said, spotting Dove coming towards them across the side lawn.
He raised a hand in greeting. Dove was one of the few people who knew all about the fake engagement and was only too happy to capitalize on it.
Nate paid her well for her services, and he was doubling her usual fee for complete discretion on this matter.
“There’s the happy couple!” Dove cooed, pulling her sunglasses up and settling them in her shiny blond hair.
“So good to meet you.” Jasmine extended her hand for a shake, finally looking something other than miserable.
Dove took it with both hands. “I’ve been a fan for years.
Okay.” She dropped into one of the patio chairs and flipped open a leather notebook without preamble.
“We have about forty minutes before Carla arrives with the photographer, so let’s get the story airtight.
I’ll be the interviewer. You two just talk to me like I’m her.
” She clicked her pen. “How did you reconnect?”
Nate went first. “We’d known each other years ago. I reached out in the spring. We had dinner, and it went well, and—”
“We bumped into each other, actually,” Jasmine cut in smoothly, not looking at him. “At a restaurant opening in West Hollywood. I almost didn’t recognize him. He’d cut his hair.”
Nate turned to look at her. He had not cut his hair.
“I love that,” Dove said, scribbling. “Very organic. No one plans a restaurant opening.”
“He’d had a terrible day,” Jasmine continued, warming to it, and Nate felt the hair on the back of his neck rise.
“He doesn’t show it, but I could tell. He has this thing he does with his jaw when he’s stressed.
” She tapped her own chin lightly. “I asked if he was okay, and I think it surprised him that someone noticed.”
Dove’s pen stopped moving. She looked up, delighted. “That’s the quote. That’s the pull quote for the whole piece.”
“We hadn’t agreed on that,” Nate said, voice quiet.
“It’s better than what you said.” Jasmine picked up her glass. “Yours sounded like a press release.”
She finally looked at him, and her expression was almost cheerful, which was somehow more irritating than the scowl. “Carla isn’t going to put we had dinner and it went well on the cover. She needs a story. She needs to feel something.”
Dove pointed at Jasmine with her pen. “She’s right.”
Nate said nothing because they were both right and he knew it, which made it worse.
They went through the rest of the story.
The first date, the second, the point at which they’d both apparently known.
Jasmine had an answer ready for every question.
The first date had been a drive up the coast, apparently, because Nate had wanted somewhere they wouldn’t be photographed.
The second had been cooking dinner at the house because Jasmine had wanted to see if he could follow instructions.
He’d made a reasonable pasta, she reported, and ruined the garlic bread, and that was when she’d known he was someone she could actually be around.
“I ruined the garlic bread,” Nate repeated flatly.
“Catastrophically.” She didn’t blink. “It was touching.”
Dove was practically vibrating. “This is gold. This is absolute gold.”
Nate looked out at the pool. He felt like he’d understood the rules, only to find someone had changed them while he wasn’t looking. He knew how to negotiate. He knew how to close. He did not know how to invent a love story on the spot, and apparently Jasmine did it the way other people breathed.
“Okay.” Dove set the notebook down and laced her fingers together. “Now the physical stuff. Carla’s going to be watching how you are with each other, even when she’s not asking questions. Little things. What do you call each other?”
Silence.
“Uh,” Nate said, by way of an answer.
“Pet names,” Dove said patiently. “Does she call you Nate, or is there something else? Do you have a name for her?”
More silence. Jasmine’s face, Nate was happy to see, turned pink.
“Right.” Dove stood up and repositioned her chair, so she was sitting directly across from them. “We’re going to practice. Sit closer together. Shoulder to shoulder.”
Jasmine shifted a few inches along the outdoor couch. Nate matched it. Their arms nearly touched.
“Closer,” Dove said.
They moved again. Now they were touching, shoulder to shoulder, the warmth of her arm against his sleeve. He kept his eyes forward.
“Eye contact,” Dove said. “When you talk to each other, you look at each other. Like you can’t help it. That’s the thing you’re selling.”
Nate turned to look at Jasmine. She turned to look at him at the same moment, and it was…
strange. He’d looked at her across a boardroom table and across a patio and through the dim of a crowded restaurant.
He hadn’t done this: looked at her from a few inches away, in daylight, with no argument.
Her eyes were darker than he remembered. He’d forgotten that.
“Hold hands,” Dove said.
Jasmine didn’t move. Neither did he.
“We’re not doing that,” Jasmine said in a pleasant voice.
“You absolutely are,” Dove said in the same tone. “Carla will be watching where your hands go. When you’re nervous, you reach for each other. That’s what couples do. So. Hands.”
A pause. Then Jasmine set her glass down and held out her hand, palm up, and looked at him with an expression that said: “Don’t make this weird.”
He took it.
Her hand was cool from the glass and her grip light, and he looked down at their joined hands for a moment longer than was necessary before he looked back up at her. She was already looking at him. He watched something move across her face that she didn’t entirely hide before she smoothed it over.
“See,” Dove said softly. “That’s the look. That’s what they’re going to photograph.”
Jasmine withdrew her hand. Casually, easily, like it hadn’t meant anything, like she’d simply finished with it. She picked her glass back up. Nate flexed his fingers once against his knee and said nothing.
“Last thing,” Dove said. “The kiss.”
“No,” Jasmine said immediately.
“Just a small one. A greeting, a goodbye. Carla will almost certainly—”
“I’m an actress,” Jasmine said. “I’ve played love scenes with men I met twenty minutes before the camera rolled. I don’t need to rehearse.” She turned to look at Nate, calm and certain. “When the moment calls for it, I’ll handle it. You don’t need to worry.”
He wasn’t worried about that. Something else warmed his chest that he didn’t want to think about, and he didn’t want to examine the feeling too closely.
“Fair enough,” Dove said and recapped her pen.
Carla arrived twenty minutes later with a photographer and two assistants, and Nate spent the first several minutes quietly braced for catastrophe.
From the moment Carla sat down across from them and asked her first question, however, Jasmine became someone else entirely.
Not a different person; something more unnerving than that. The same person, but unlocked. Warmer.
She laughed easily and leaned into him at the right moments and told the garlic bread story as if it were the funniest thing she had ever witnessed, and Carla laughed along with her.
Nate realized something unsettling was happening.
He was relaxing. There was no effort in it. She made it effortless.
She said his name with an ease that made it sound like a word she’d always known, and when she talked about him, she did it the way people talked about someone they’d chosen deliberately. He found himself listening to her the same way Carla did, which was not something he’d planned.
When Carla asked him what he loved about her, he opened his mouth, and the honest answer arrived before any prepared one could.
“She says exactly what she thinks,” he said. “She always has. I don’t meet many people who’ll tell me the truth without dressing it up first.”
Jasmine turned to look at him. Something flickered behind her eyes that he couldn’t name.
“He’s not as difficult as advertised,” she told Carla, with a smile he felt as well as saw. “There’s actually a softie beneath that hard exterior.”
Carla wrote something in her notebook and underlined it twice. When the interview wrapped up, she shook both their hands and told them the piece was going to be wonderful, and then she passed them off to the photographer, who took them out to the garden for the shoot.
The photographs were taken in the last of the afternoon light, the city spilling away below the ridge behind them.
The photographer put them close together along the garden wall and told them to ignore him entirely, which was, Nate supposed, easier said than done.
He stood at Jasmine’s side and looked out at the view, and she leaned her shoulder into his and said something quietly to herself.
He glanced down to hear it, but she’d already stopped.
Her profile was still. She was looking out at the city with an expression that was softer than anything she’d worn in his presence before, as though she’d momentarily forgotten to be guarded, as though she’d simply looked at the view and found it beautiful.
He was watching that expression when she turned toward him, closed the remaining inch between them, and kissed him.
It was brief. A press of lips, the barest warmth of it, done in a second. She pulled back and returned her eyes to the horizon, calm and composed, as if she’d done nothing more than step over a puddle. His heart did something that shocked him, a flip and a little jig.
Quickly, he looked back out at the city. His jaw was set. He made sure of it.
“Perfect,” the photographer said from somewhere to his left.
Dove sent the digital proof that evening, a selection of images for approval before the piece went to print.
Nate was at the kitchen island when the email arrived.
He opened it and scrolled to the images and stopped.
The couple in the photographs was at ease with each other. They leaned without thinking about it.
In the last image, taken in the half-second after the kiss, the man was looking down at the woman. A man that Nate didn’t recognize. He looked… happy.
He forwarded the email to Jasmine without a note. She replied four minutes later.
They’re good.
He typed back. No going back now. When this hits newsstands, we’re in for the full thing. Every camera in the city. Every question.
The reply came in a minute later.
I know, she wrote. It’ll be worth it in the end.
He read it twice. He couldn’t tell if she meant the money, or something else. He wasn’t entirely sure she could either. He set the phone down and looked at the last photograph one more time, the one where he was looking at her, and then he closed the email and went back to work.