15. Jasmine
JASMINE
The restaurant Nate chose was the kind of place that was trying extremely hard in ways designed to look effortless.
Exposed brick and candlelight and a menu that described everything in three words when ten would have been clearer.
The kind of place a man took a woman when he wanted to impress her without appearing to want to impress her.
Jasmine wasn’t sure if that counted as romantic or exhausting. Possibly both.
They were seated in a corner booth, partially sheltered from the room, which she appreciated.
It felt less like a performance than their usual outings.
No carpet, no press line, just two people at a table with good wine and the hum of other people’s conversations around them.
Dove had tipped off one photographer, who had gotten what he needed from the arrival and then left them to it.
That was the amount of public exposure Jasmine could tolerate.
The kind where she got to eat her actual meal.
“To Taylor Hartner,” Nate said, raising his glass.
Jasmine raised hers and touched it to his. “To Taylor Hartner.”
“And to passing a fitness test due to already being a superhero,” he added, with the dry edge she’d grown accustomed to.
She laughed despite herself. “I wouldn’t describe myself as that.”
“You came home looking like you’d survived something, and hours later they gave you the part, so.” He shrugged. “I’m putting it together.”
She shook her head and took a sip of wine, and the warmth of it and the candlelight and the relief that had been sitting in her chest since Marco’s call yesterday loosened something in her. She let herself be here, fully, without the usual low hum of anxiety running underneath everything.
“I keep waiting for someone to call back and say there’s been a mistake,” she admitted.
“There hasn’t been.”
She looked at him across the table. “That’s a very nice thing to say.”
“It’s an accurate thing to say.” He picked up his menu, the moment closed, the compliment delivered and immediately made businesslike, which was so entirely him that she almost smiled. “What are you eating?”
She was, she realized, genuinely having a good time.
That was the thing she hadn’t expected when she’d agreed to this dinner: that it wouldn’t feel like an appointment.
That she’d sit across from Nate in a candlelit restaurant and find herself actually present in it rather than managing it from a careful distance.
They talked about the film, about what training for the role would look like, about a director she admired who had done something similar with an actress a few years back.
Nate had opinions, informed ones, which shouldn’t have surprised her but did.
He talked about a documentary he’d watched recently.
She told him about the book she’d been reading.
He’d read it too, had a different take on the ending, and they went back and forth about it for ten minutes with the easy friction of two people who were used to being right and had met their match, and somewhere in the middle of it she laughed so hard at something he said that she had to put down her fork.
“That’s not what he meant, and you know it,” she said, still laughing.
“It’s absolutely what he meant. The whole second half of the book is right there in that one paragraph if you’d just—”
“I read it, Nate.”
“You read it wrong.”
“You can’t read a novel wrong.”
“You can read it incompletely,” he said, and the straightness of his face while he said it made her laugh all over again.
When she looked up from it, his expression had shifted into something that wasn’t the dry boardroom version of him she’d started out with. It was softer. Unguarded, the way he got sometimes in the kitchen late at night when he’d forgotten to put the armor back on.
At some point his hand had found hers on top of the table. She wasn’t sure when it had happened. His thumb moved once, slowly, across her knuckles, and she looked down at their joined hands and then back up at him. And for a long, suspended moment, neither of them said anything.
Was this for the benefit of the room? She couldn’t tell.
She’d gotten good at reading the difference between the performed version of him and the real one, or she’d thought she had, but right now, in the candlelight with his hand warm over hers and his eyes on her face, she genuinely could not locate the seam between them.
What she could locate was what she was feeling.
It moved through her like a steady wave.
She was feeling something for him. Not residual warmth from the old weeks six years ago, not appreciation because he just happened to be the one in front of her.
Something new. Something that had been building in the space of ordinary evenings and comfortable silences and small kindnesses.
The timing was, as always, impeccable.
She was trying to decide what to do with this new feeling when Nate’s phone buzzed on the table.
He glanced at it. She watched his jaw set in the particular way it did when work was pulling at him.
Jasmine bit her bottom lip. Was he seriously considering answering? This was supposed to be a night of celebration — he was the one who’d suggested it! — and she’d put her phone on mute and left it in her purse.
“I have to take this,” he said. “Two minutes.”
He was already sliding out of the booth.
She picked up her wine glass but didn’t drink. Instead, she stared at the candle in the middle of the table, wondering if she was making too big a deal out of this. He’d said two minutes. He’d be right back.
But then two minutes stretched to five, and then to ten.
She could see him from where she sat, standing near the entrance with one finger pressed to his ear, the body language of a man entirely elsewhere.
The soft version of him that had been sitting across from her, the one with the unguarded eyes and the thumb moving across her knuckles, had packed itself away, and in its place was the one she’d met in the hallway of a party, the one who had a company to run and a world that apparently stopped for nothing, including a dinner he had invited her to.
Fifteen minutes passed.
When he came back to the table, she had her hands in her lap and her face arranged into something neutral.
“Sorry,” he said, settling back into his seat. “Frankfurt.”
“Frankfurt.” She nodded slowly. “Right.”
Was that supposed to mean something to her? He’d said it like she should understand, like his work was so important that every person in the world was paying detailed attention to it.
He looked at her. “It was important.”
“It always is.” She kept her voice even. “That’s the thing, isn’t it? It was important six years ago, too. It’s always going to be important. There’s always going to be a Frankfurt.”
The air between them changed. She watched him understand what she was referencing, watched something close off behind his eyes.
“That’s not fair,” he said.
“Probably not.” She picked up her fork. “I’m just observing a pattern.”
“We have the rest of the night together, Jasmine. The call was legitimate business.”
“And business can never wait.” Her voice was still quiet, still level, because there were other diners around them and she was not going to become a scene.
“I’m not asking you to stop being who you are.
I’m just noting that you walked out of this dinner for fifteen minutes to take a call, and we have a lot riding on people believing we’re madly in love with each other, and maybe that’s something to think about. ”
She was dancing around the real problem, which was that his choice had hurt her feelings terribly. She had pride, though. Perhaps too much of it.
“I was gone for ten minutes,” he scoffed.
“I know how long you were gone.”
He set his jaw. “I apologized.”
“I heard you.”
They ate in silence for a moment, the easy warmth of earlier thoroughly gone, replaced by the familiar friction that she’d been almost starting to forget about. Almost. It hadn’t taken long, had it, for the real version of them to come back?
Whatever she’d felt when his hand was over hers on the table, whatever had moved through her, was exactly the kind of feeling she could not afford.
This was what he did. He made you feel like the only person in the room and then excused himself to take a call and came back expecting everything to be where he’d left it.
It was the same man. He hadn’t changed.
She had just, temporarily and foolishly, let herself forget that.
She became aware of something in her peripheral vision. A man at a table across the room, half-turned toward them with his phone angled in a way that she recognized. He was filming them but trying to make it seem like he was doing something else on his phone.
A lump formed in Jasmine’s throat.
“Someone’s recording us,” she said quietly.
Nate looked up without moving his head, found the man, and looked back at his plate. “I see him. How long has he been doing that?”
“I’m not sure,” she murmured.
Probably since they’d been bickering, in other words.
The bad feeling spread outward from her chest. She couldn’t tell how much the man had gotten, whether the audio from across the room would be audible or just footage of two engaged people who were very clearly not having a lovely dinner.
Either way, it was not the image they needed in circulation right now.
They finished the meal without saying much, keeping their voices low and their expressions neutral. She let him put his hand on her back when they left, smiled for the photographer waiting outside, but said nothing in the car on the way home.
At the house she went straight to her wing. She didn’t say goodnight. She heard him move through the kitchen, heard the sound of a glass, heard his footsteps eventually go the other way.
She sat on the edge of the bed in the dark, the same edge, the same dark, the position she seemed to end up in whenever this arrangement reminded her of what it actually was.
Nate was not a man she should fall for. She’d known it before tonight, had told herself as much on a number of occasions, and tonight had simply confirmed it in technicolor. He was a man who would always choose the deal. The work that had been there before her and would be there after.
A woman could spend a very long time waiting for a man like that to show up completely, and she had too much to protect — her health, her career, her heart — to be that woman.
She fell back on the bed without taking her shoes off and stared at the ceiling for a long time.