21. Nate
NATE
The beach house had one living room, one kitchen, one porch, the loft, and the one bedroom. Nate had known this before he suggested coming here. He hadn’t fully thought through what it would mean in practice.
What it meant in practice was that the avoidance system he and Jasmine established on the first day together required considerably more effort than the one at the ridge house, which had essentially run itself on square footage alone.
Here, there was no square footage to hide behind.
There was only the unspoken agreement that whoever needed the kitchen got the kitchen, and whoever needed the porch got the porch, and conversations were kept to the functional minimum.
It worked. Mostly.
The problem was that the house was small enough that he could hear her moving around in it. It was a constant distraction, pulling at the edges of his focus when he was supposed to be working.
It wasn’t that she was loud. She was just… there.
And somehow her simply being there was the most distracting thing she could ever do.
He heard her make tea in the mornings before he was up. He heard her on the phone to Eden sometimes, the low murmur of it carrying through the walls. He heard her laugh once, at something Eden said, bright and unguarded, the real one, and he sat very still at his desk until it stopped.
By the second night, he’d burned through his emails and run out of legitimate work to occupy himself with by one in the morning. He sat at the small desk in the corner of the living room with a book he wasn’t reading and listened to the ocean.
He heard her before he saw her. Footsteps from the bedroom, the soft sound of the kitchen tap running briefly, and then silence that stretched long enough that he turned a page without absorbing a single word on it.
She appeared in the doorway.
She had one arm wrapped around her middle, which he assumed at first was the cold. The coastal air came through the gaps in the old window frames, and even though the heat worked decently well, it still made the place drafty.
But then something about her face stopped him. He knew her tired face by now. This wasn’t it. This was something else, something sitting deeper than tiredness.
“Sorry,” she said, noticing him. “I didn’t realize you’d still be up.”
“It’s fine.” He closed the book. “There’s tea, if you want it.”
“I’m okay.” She came in anyway and lowered herself carefully onto the other end of the sofa, pulling a blanket from the back of it over her legs. She found a position and went still in it. Her whole body was stiff. Was she sick?
He picked the book back up and gave her the quiet. The ocean filled the silence between them, low and even.
After a while he said, “Still work stress?”
He said it without looking up. Not as a needle. Just an opening, left on the table for her to take or leave.
She looked at him. He kept his eyes on the page.
“No,” she said. The word came out smaller than her usual answers. Less managed. “It’s not that.”
The vulnerability in her voice took him by surprise. It was something he’d never heard from her. Even when she let her walls down around him, there was still a strength and a joy holding her up. Right now, she sounded like she was at the end of her rope.
He set the book down. “Are you not feeling well? Can I get you anything?”
She was staring at the dark window, her jaw set. He’d seen her make decisions before. She was fast, clean, without visible deliberation. This one took longer. When she turned back to him, her face had something in it he hadn’t seen before. The look of a person carrying secret pain.
Everyone had that look at some point in their lives, their own crosses to bear. Nate could tell that whatever Jasmine was carrying, it was heavy. Probably something that had been with her a long time.
“I have fibromyalgia,” she said. “I was diagnosed about six weeks ago. Right before we saw each other again at the restaurant opening.” She said it straight out, no softening, the way she said all difficult things.
“It’s chronic. No cure. The aches, the fatigue — that’s what it’s been. That’s what it’s always going to be.”
He didn’t say anything immediately. He let it land properly, the way it deserved to.
Six weeks ago. Before the restaurant opening, before the boardroom, before any of it. She’d walked through all of it carrying this, and he hadn’t known, and he felt like the biggest asshole in the world for not noticing.
Flashes came back to him. Moments where she’d moved slower. Where she’d pressed her fingers to her temple, looking like she’d suddenly developed a headache. The nights when she’d spent longer hours in bed.
“I’m sorry,” he breathed.
There was so much more he wanted to say, but he didn’t want to make this moment about his feelings. He was shocked that she’d just revealed something so big to him, and he wanted to be there in whatever way she needed. He suspected what she needed was a listening ear.
Indeed, she continued talking.
“It’s the most frightening thing that’s ever happened to me.
I have a career built on showing up and being fine.
And I have a body that can’t promise me that anymore.
” She pulled the blanket higher. “This industry forgets about you so fast. If a production gets burned because I can’t get through a day, if word gets out that I’m a liability—” She stopped.
“I’m terrified of becoming irrelevant. Of losing everything I worked for before I’m done working for it. ”
Outside, the waves came in and pulled back. Came in and pulled back.
“You just got cast as one of the leads in a superhero franchise,” Nate said. “A production doctor and a trainer tested you and cleared you. They watched you under pressure and still picked you over everyone else. I know you can do this.”
“That’s now.” Her voice was flat, not dismissive.
“What about in three years? Five? What if I have a bad flare during filming? What if I can’t get through a shoot day and the whole production has to stop for me?
” She shook her head. “You don’t know what it’s like to have something you can’t negotiate with.
It’s different when it’s money or anything else related to business.
When it’s your body, you don’t get a say.
You can’t push it past what it can do. There’s no pushing through some pain. ”
She wasn’t wrong, and he didn’t pretend she was. “No,” he said. “There isn’t.”
She looked away from him. “I feel broken, Nate. Like just telling you this…” She drew a shuddering breath. “Maybe I shouldn’t have told you. It’s going to make you see me differently.”
“Since when do you care what I think?” He smiled, trying to make light of it.
She bit her bottom lip and continued to look away, and he realized, with a shock, that she did care. Just as, somewhere along this journey together, he had started caring what she thought of him.
“When we met with our lawyers, you walked into a room full of people whose job it is to stay unimpressed,” he said instead, looking at her directly.
“And they couldn’t do it. I was in that boardroom.
I watched you.” He paused. “Jasmine Caulfield could never be irrelevant. That’s not a kindness. It’s just accurate.”
She held his gaze for a long moment. Something in her face shifted — an almost imperceptible drop of the guard, the kind that only happened when something had landed somewhere real rather than glancing off the surface.
“I keep thinking I can outrun it,” she said.
“If I manage well enough, rest enough, see the right people. Then maybe it won’t matter.
” She looked at her hands in her lap. “But that’s not how chronic illness works.
I know that. You can’t outrun it. You just have to live alongside it. And I don’t know how to do that yet.”
“I don’t think anyone does, at the beginning.”
She glanced over at him. “You seem like you’d be good at it. The strategizing. The optimizing.”
“I’m only good at things I can control,” he said.
And then, because she’d just told him something true and the hour was late, and the ocean was loud, and something about this small lamp-lit room made pretending feel like too much effort: “I’ve built more than most people will in a lifetime.
And I still go to sleep some nights convinced I’m one bad quarter away from losing all of it. From being nothing again.”
It was the most honest thing he’d said to anyone in years. Possibly ever.
Jasmine looked at him, and her expression wasn’t pity. It wasn’t surprise. It was recognition.
“No amount of it stops the feeling,” she said quietly.
“No,” he said. “It doesn’t.”
They sat with that. The lamp made everything amber and soft, and the ocean kept going outside, steady and indifferent and enormous.
He thought about all the evenings at the penthouse, the ones that ended with him still at his desk at two in the morning because the alternative was facing how lonely it was at the top.
He’d called that productive. He’d called it necessary.
Sitting here now, in a house that was a fraction of the size, with a woman who had just exposed her heart to him, he wasn’t entirely sure what to call it anymore.
She didn’t get up, and he didn’t reach for his book.
“Thank you,” she said after a while. “For not making it into something manageable. People do that. They hear something hard and immediately want to solve it.”
“I’m not sure I could solve this one,” he said.
“No.” There was something almost like warmth in it. “But you didn’t try. That’s the part that matters.”
He looked at her, and she looked back. The distance they’d gotten so good at maintaining, and always dancing around, seemed like it had never existed in the first place.
Nate briefly wondered what would have happened all those years ago if he’d gone to their dinner. If he’d stayed for the next night. And the next.
Would they not have two separate lives now, but one?
It was too big, too vague a question. The kind that would never be answered, and so he let it go.
They stayed there a while longer, in the quiet and the lamplight, and something that had been held carefully at a distance between them moved a little closer.