11. Nate
NATE
The magazine chose the picture that had been taken the second after Jasmine kissed Nate. Because of course they did. He looked like a man in love.
Which he wasn’t. Not one bit. Rather, he was a man who admired the woman in front of him. Despite her coldness to him, he’d seen her true abilities shine that day, and he couldn’t help but respect her for it.
Forwarding the link to the magazine cover to Graham, Nate added a note. Get ready to pay up.
Chuckling to himself, he opened the front door of the house and slipped his phone into his pocket. He’d spent the last couple nights at the house instead of the penthouse, feeling like he needed a break from the chaos of downtown.
The place was big enough that he and Jasmine didn’t run into each other too much. Actually, he found that he kind of liked the background noise of another person in his space. Plus, her candles weren’t too bad once you got used to them.
Walking into the kitchen, he found her sitting at the island, hair in a ponytail, her posture slumped.
“No candles out here?” Nate teased. “I’d have thought—”
He stopped at the sight of her downturned lips, the tears in her eyes.
Sitting up straight, she quickly and furiously wiped at her face.
“Sorry.” Her voice was level, or close enough to it. “Ignore that.”
He didn’t move from the doorway. “What’s wrong?”
She looked up at him with an expression that was almost surprised, like the question hadn’t been one she was expecting. Like she’d braced for a different version of him to walk through that door. “Nothing. Work stress.”
“Work stress,” he repeated.
“Yes.” She put her phone face-down on the counter and straightened her ponytail, the gesture of a person pulling themselves back together. “It’s nothing. Are you hungry? Your chef came and meal-prepped. There are things in the fridge.”
She was already moving, already redirecting, and he recognized the maneuver because he’d used it himself more times than he could count.
Here is a different subject. Please take it.
He was usually grateful when people did.
He took the out nine times out of ten, because other people’s private pain was not his department and he’d never pretended otherwise.
He pulled out a stool and sat down at the island. “What kind of work stress?”
She paused at the refrigerator door. Just briefly, a half-second, and then she opened it. “The usual kind. Nothing that will affect the arrangement.”
The arrangement. That was what she called it when she wanted to remind them both of the terms. He’d noticed she reached for the word whenever things got too close to something real. He couldn’t blame her for it. He did the same thing with different language.
“I wasn’t asking because of the arrangement,” he said.
She turned from the fridge and looked at him for a moment, a container of grilled chicken and vegetables in her hand. Her eyes were still a little bright. She’d done an impressive job of clearing them in the span of about thirty seconds, which told him this was a skill she’d had reason to develop.
“I know you weren’t,” she said, and something in her voice had shifted, gone softer at the edges, less like armor. Then it came back. “I’m fine, Nate. Really.”
She set the food on the counter and turned to find a pan, and he watched her for a moment: the careful way she moved, the set of her shoulders, the way she kept her back to him while she got herself the rest of the way together.
And he felt the pull of wanting to push. To ask the real question rather than the polite one. It surprised him, that pull. He wasn’t someone who asked real questions. He didn’t, as a rule, go looking for things that weren’t his to carry.
But she’d been crying alone in his kitchen over something she’d called nothing, and he wasn’t entirely sure he believed her, and he cared about her.
A little bit. Not too much.
But care he did.
He also knew she didn’t like him. Whatever had just happened in this kitchen, whatever she was holding, she wasn’t going to hand it to him. Not now, maybe not ever. He’d forfeited that kind of trust six years ago and signed a contract that made them business partners, nothing else.
So he let it go. He watched her heat up the food and didn’t say anything else, and when she slid a plate in his direction a few minutes later without being asked, he took it, said thank you, and left it at that.
She sat down on the other side of the island, and they ate in silence, but it wasn’t the hostile kind. It was, if he was being precise about it, something that felt almost like two people who were tired in the same way at the end of the same long day.
There was something physical happening. He couldn’t have said exactly what tipped him off.
The way she shifted her weight on the stool every few minutes, subtle enough that she probably didn’t know she was doing it.
The way she’d reached for her tea mug with both hands wrapped around it, like the warmth helped.
Once, when she thought he was looking at his phone, she pressed two fingers briefly against the side of her neck and closed her eyes for just a second.
It wasn’t work stress. Or it wasn’t only that.
He turned his phone over in his hands and said nothing, because the look on her face every time he’d come close to the edge of something real tonight had been the same look.
Polite. Closed. The face of a person who had decided exactly how much of themselves this situation was going to get.
He respected it. It was the same face he showed most of the world most of the time.
It was just strange to be on the receiving end of it.
“You should probably take something,” he said, without looking up from his phone.
A pause. “What?”
“For whatever’s hurting.” He kept his voice easy, like he was commenting on the weather. “I’m not asking what it is. Just saying. There’s a first aid cabinet above the second bathroom sink. Marisol keeps it stocked.”
The silence that followed was heavy. He could feel her annoyance.
“I’m fine,” Jasmine said.
“Sure,” he said.
She shifted on the stool again and said nothing else.
He let it go because she’d made clear enough that was what she wanted, and the least he could do at this point was want the things she wanted.
He picked up his phone and scrolled without seeing anything for a while, and then he remembered something from earlier in the day and laughed before he could stop himself.
She looked over. “What?”
“Nothing. Something that happened today.”
She waited, which he took as permission.
“One of the companies in my building,” he said, setting his phone down, “has a guinea pig. Office pet. Apparently that’s a thing people do now.
” He’d been genuinely baffled to learn this.
“Anyway, someone left the cage unlatched this morning and the thing got out. Spent about three hours loose somewhere in the building. They sent a facilities-wide email about a missing guinea pig named Gerald.”
Jasmine’s expression shifted slightly. “Gerald.”
“Gerald. Tan and white, answers to his name apparently, though I have doubts about that claim.” He leaned back in his seat.
“So the whole building’s on alert. People checking the stairwells.
Someone’s crying in the lobby, which… I’m not gonna comment on.
Maybe this guinea pig really is that amazing, you know? ”
Jasmine grinned. Buoyed, Nate went on.
“And then at around two o’clock I’m coming back from a meeting, I stop at the snack bar on my floor to get a coffee…”
Her chin had lifted. She was watching him.
“And there’s Gerald,” Nate said. “Right there on the counter next to the protein bars. Just sitting there. The woman who runs the bar had put a little bowl of granola out for him and was calling him baby.”
Jasmine stared at him. “You’re serious.”
“I sent a photograph to Radha. She didn’t believe me either.” He shook his head. “Apparently, he’d gotten into the ventilation system and traveled three floors before ending up at the snack bar. Which, honestly. Good instincts. It is the best floor for snacks.”
The laugh came out of her before she seemed to decide to allow it — bright and sudden and completely unguarded, the kind that crinkled the corners of her eyes. It lasted only a few seconds before she caught it, but it had been real. No performance in it at all.
Something in his chest settled quietly in response to that, like a door he hadn’t known was open easing shut.
“Did Gerald make it back okay?” she asked, and there was still a trace of it in her voice, the laugh just underneath the words.
“Safely returned. The woman from the snack bar walked him up herself. She seemed genuinely sad to see him go.” He paused. “She gave him the rest of the granola for the road.”
Jasmine shook her head slowly, still smiling down at the counter. It was a small smile, and it was tired around the edges, but it was real, and it was the first one he’d seen that hadn’t been built for an audience.
He picked up his phone again and didn’t make a thing of it.
“Good night,” she said eventually, sliding off the stool. She moved carefully, he noticed. Slowly, like she was trying to make it look natural.
“Good night,” he said. “Cabinet above the second bathroom sink.”
She paused in the doorway. “Thanks.”
He kept his eyes on his phone.
“Good night, Nate,” she said again, and this time it was almost warm.