18. Jasmine
JASMINE
Jasmine turned in the full-length mirrors that created a half circle around her, the princess-cut dress swirling about her waist.
“Beautiful,” the saleswoman cooed, hands clasped. “It looks great with your waist and shoulders.”
“What do you think?” Jasmine asked Eden.
From her seat on the overstuffed bench, Eden gave her a double thumbs-up. “You look amazing.”
Jasmine turned to the mirror once more, but this time her heart sank. Dress shopping was supposed to be fun. A once-in-a-lifetime event where you laughed with your friends and drank too much champagne.
There certainly was champagne. Jasmine had already downed two glasses of it, and this was only the third dress she’d tried on. There had been no laughter, though.
“Hand me my phone, please?” she asked Eden, who passed it over.
Taking a full-body snap of her reflection, Jasmine sent the picture to Nate. What do you think? she texted.
The bubbles appeared as he texted back.
Looks great. Whatever you want. Remember all final wedding choices are up to you.
Jasmine checked a sigh. Yes, they had agreed to that, and she’d been happy about it at the time, but now she found something lacking with an engagement where the other person was completely hands-off in the wedding planning.
It didn’t matter that the whole relationship was a sham.
Shouldn’t they make this as enjoyable as possible?
“There’s a beaded mermaid that would look amazing on you,” the saleswoman was saying. “And then I suggest we also try—”
“This one’s perfect,” Jasmine said. “I’ll take it.”
The woman’s mouth hung open in surprise. Jasmine wondered if she’d ever had a bride pick a dress so quickly.
But it didn’t matter. This dress looked good. It was fine. This wasn’t Jasmine’s real wedding. One day, after she and Nate divorced, she would meet someone else, fall in love, stand in front of the altar with them, and…
For some reason, when she imagined this future, the man in it looked suspiciously like Nate.
She handed the phone back to Eden and stepped off the platform. “Lunch?” she asked.
“Lunch,” Eden agreed.
They went to lunch at a place a few blocks from the bridal boutique, a sun-filled Italian spot with small tables on a sidewalk patio.
Jasmine ordered pasta she didn’t have much appetite for and picked at it while Eden talked, and the warmth of the afternoon and the two glasses of champagne from earlier conspired to make everything feel slightly removed, like she was watching the day through glass.
Her hips ached. They’d been aching since she’d woken up, a low insistent throb that she’d been managing with denial and over-the-counter painkillers that had become her default strategy.
Standing on a platform in a bridal boutique for ninety minutes had not helped.
She shifted in her chair and told herself to stop thinking about it.
“Okay,” Eden said, setting down her fork. “I have to show you something.”
She pulled out her phone and turned it to face Jasmine. On the screen was a photograph of a man. Dark-haired, easy smile, the kind of face that looked like it laughed often. He was standing somewhere outdoors, slightly squinting into the sun, entirely unaware of the camera.
“He’s cute,” Jasmine said, happy for the distraction. She took the phone in order to inspect him more closely. “Is this the guy you went out with last week?”
“Third date was last night,” Eden said, and the word date came out differently than it usually did from her. Softer. More careful with it.
Jasmine looked at the photo and then at her friend’s face, and what she saw there stopped her mid-breath. Eden was glowing. She was lit up from somewhere inside.
“Eden,” Jasmine said. “You really like him.”
“I really like him,” Eden confirmed, in a voice she was clearly trying to keep casual and failing completely.
“His name is Daniel. He’s a sound engineer.
He made me laugh so hard on the second date that I cried, like actually cried, and I thought that was embarrassing, but he said it was his favorite thing that had happened to him all year, so. ”
“So,” Jasmine echoed.
“So I think maybe.” Eden took the phone back and looked at the photo herself for a moment, the way people looked at things they were still getting used to. “I don’t want to jinx it by saying it out loud.”
“Then don’t. Just keep looking at him like that.”
Eden laughed and put her phone away, and they talked about Daniel for a while.
Eden told her about his family, which was a big one that he was close to and had Sunday dinner with every week.
She hadn’t met them yet, but Daniel had mentioned that he’d like to bring her to one of the dinners at some point soon.
Jasmine listened and asked the right questions and felt, underneath all of it, a feeling she wasn’t proud of but recognized instantly.
Jealousy.
Not of Eden specifically, not of Daniel with his easy smile.
Of the thing itself. The uncomplicated, terrifying, wonderful thing of falling for someone who was available to be fallen for.
The freedom of it. You could like a person and tell your best friend about it over lunch with nothing underneath the story except the story itself.
No contracts. No clauses. No hundred million dollars, a one-year term, and a clean exit at the end.
No man who was handsome and witty, but who could burn you at a moment’s notice, who would leave you behind for a work call. Who would shutter you from his life with no warning at all because further success was always another step away and if you weren’t meant to be a part of it, well, too bad.
Jasmine wanted what Eden had, what it felt like half the women in the world had.
She’d always wanted it, in the abstract, the way everyone wanted it.
But sitting here across from Eden with her glowing face and her carefully guarded hope, she felt the wanting sharply and specifically, like a bruise pressed on.
She’d thought, briefly — stupidly, she now understood — that something real between her and Nate might have been possible.
In the spaces between the performing and the bickering, in the kitchen late at night and the car rides and her mother’s sofa with the photo album, she’d let herself wonder.
She’d felt things she had no business feeling and filed them under to be dealt with later and kept going, and at some point later had arrived and the feelings were still there, unchanged and inconvenient and pointed directly at a man who answered his phone at dinner and kept his house like a museum and had made it extremely clear from the beginning that this was a transaction, nothing more.
That didn’t seem possible anymore. The wondering felt naive in the light of someone entering a relationship that was honest and real. Nate was who he was. She’d always known who he was.
A cutthroat billionaire. The kind of man who had no problem burning bridges and leaving people in his dust. He didn’t wait for anyone, and that’s why he’d been so successful in life.
She was giving up a year, and with it whatever chances the year might have held for something real. That was the trade she’d made, and it was the right trade, and she was going to stop sitting in the sun feeling sorry about it because it didn’t change anything.
“You’ve gone quiet,” Eden observed. “Is everything okay? God, am I talking too much about myself?” She buried her face in her hands. “I’m sorry. This day is supposed to be about you. It’s the day you try on wedding dresses, and here I am—”
“It’s okay,” Jasmine interrupted. “Really.” She lowered her voice so they wouldn’t be overheard. “Today isn’t real. This wedding dress doesn’t count.”
Eden’s face fell, and Jasmine realized that her friend felt sorry for her.
Jasmine waved her hand. “One day, I’ll have a real wedding. We’ll pick out a real wedding dress together, and that will be a day to celebrate.”
“Are you sure I’m not hogging the attention?” Eden asked, a blush still on her cheeks.
“I’m happy for you,” Jasmine said and meant it, fully and without reservation, even with the jealousy underneath. “I really am.”
Eden looked at her for a moment with the eyes that saw too much. “I know you are,” she said gently. “You’re also thinking about Nate.”
Jasmine didn’t confirm or deny it. She picked up her water glass.
“Whatever it is,” Eden said, “it doesn’t have to be decided today.”
“Some of it does,” Jasmine said.
Her phone lit up on the table. She turned it over half out of habit, expecting Dove or Marco, and found an email from the production company.
She opened it just to give it a quick glance, and there was her schedule for the superhero film laid out in clean columns.
Dates and locations and call times running across the next several months like a map of the future suddenly made concrete.
She scrolled through it. The table read was in eight weeks. Two weeks after the wedding. Which was fine, because she and Nate were only going on a “honeymoon” for a few days. Just a quick trip to Napa. One Jasmine planned on being thoroughly intoxicated for the duration of.
After that, when she got back, there would be costume fittings, then training sessions, and a stunt choreographer three times a week starting in week three.
The production was thorough and demanding and completely unforgiving in the way that only a major studio film could be, and it was, if everything held, going to be the biggest thing she had ever done.
If everything held.
That was the clause she couldn’t escape.
The symptoms had been creeping back over the past week, the ache in her hips that the physical therapist called a flare and that Jasmine called a threat.
The stress was feeding it. She knew that now, understood the relationship between her body and her anxiety in a way she hadn’t before the diagnosis.
Planning a fake wedding while managing a chronic illness while preparing to film a major motion picture while pretending to be in love with a man she was accidentally actually falling for was not, it turned out, a low-stress undertaking.
Not one bit.
She put the phone face-down on the table.
“Good news?” Eden asked.
“Schedule for the film’s pre-production.” She managed a smile. “The table read is two weeks after the wedding.”
“Oh my gosh.” Eden’s voice had gone warm. “This is so exciting!”
“It is,” she agreed.
And it was. She held onto that. Under the aching hips and the complicated feelings and the dress chosen too quickly in a boutique that smelled of other people’s joy, there was a role that was hers, a character she already loved, a version of the future that belonged entirely to her and to no one else.
That was real. That was something nothing else in life could touch.
She straightened in her chair because her back was complaining and sitting up helped, and because she’d been slumping for long enough.
“Tell me more about Daniel,” she said.
Eden’s face did the glowing thing again, and Jasmine smiled at her and let the afternoon be what it was.