22. Jasmine
JASMINE
Jasmine awoke to the smell of toast.
For a moment she didn’t move, just lay there with her eyes closed and let the smell reach her.
Toast… and coffee, and beneath both of those the salt air coming through the gap in the window she’d left cracked overnight because the sound of the ocean helped her sleep.
She’d slept better than she had in weeks.
Longer, too. The heavy, dreamless kind that her body had been quietly begging for and that she’d been too wound up to give it.
Then she heard Nate in the kitchen, the soft clink of things being moved around, and remembered where she was and who was making breakfast.
She sat up slowly, taking inventory the way she did every morning now.
What hurt, what didn’t. Her shoulders were stiff.
Her hips less so than yesterday, which was something.
The fog was thin this morning, which was the thing she was most grateful for.
She could think clearly, which meant she could be a person rather than a performance of one.
She was reaching for her robe when Nate called from the other side of the door. “May I come in?”
He hadn’t asked to enter her room since they’d arrived here, and for a second she was too surprised to say anything. Recovering herself, she pulled on her robe. “Yeah, sure.”
Nate came in sideways, managing the door with his elbow because both hands were occupied with a tray. On it were two plates, two coffee mugs, and a small glass of orange juice.
He stopped as the door finished swinging itself open. “I didn’t know how you took your coffee.”
“Milk, no sugar.” She stared at the tray. “Nate. You didn’t have to—”
“I know, but I wanted to.” He carefully set the tray on the end of the bed, determined not to spill anything. “There wasn’t much in the kitchen, so it’s just toast and eggs, but—”
“It’s perfect,” she said.
He looked up at her. Something crossed his face briefly that she didn’t have a name for yet. Then he sat on the edge of the bed on top of the covers, leaving a careful distance between them, and handed her a mug.
Jasmine wrapped both hands around it and looked down at the tray and felt something move through her that was inconvenient and warm and entirely beyond her current ability to nip.
They ate together, the tray between them, his knee a few inches from hers on top of the duvet. Outside the window the ocean was gray and bright at the same time, the way it got on mornings when the sun was behind clouds. A seagull went past the window.
“Can I ask you something?” she said, halfway through the cup of coffee.
“Go ahead.”
“When you first came to LA. What was it actually like? Your life?”
He considered that for a moment. “Cheap,” he said. “Mainly. I couldn’t afford furniture for the first two years. I had a mattress on the floor and two plastic crates from a hardware store that I used as a desk.”
She turned to look at him. “Plastic crates.”
“One for the laptop and one for the monitor.” He said it plainly, no performance of humility in it. “I ate a lot of instant noodles. I kept the heat off to save money when it got in the forties in the winter. Only ran the air conditioning when I absolutely had to.”
She laughed, and he almost smiled, and the morning felt easy in a way that she hadn’t been expecting and didn’t want to examine too closely in case the examining ruined it.
“Eden and I didn’t have a couch,” she offered. “Our whole living room was two cushions on the floor. We told ourselves it was a Japanese minimalist thing, but really we just couldn’t afford it.”
“Did it work? The minimalist angle?”
“For about a week. Then we started calling it what it was.” She picked up her toast. “She still lives simply. By choice now, not necessity. She never really wanted the big life.” She paused, thinking of Eden’s glowing face over the cortado, the photograph of Daniel on her phone.
“She’s happy. Genuinely. I think some people just know what they need, and she’s always been one of them. ”
“But you help her out,” Nate said. “Don’t you?”
She looked at him. “How did you—”
“The way you talk about her.” He shrugged. “I’m guessing.”
Jasmine set her mug down on the tray. “When I got my first big paycheck, the first thing I did was go to a furniture store and buy Eden an entire apartment’s worth of furniture.
Sofa, bed frame, proper dining table. Everything.
” She picked her mug back up. “She cried. I cried. The delivery men were very uncomfortable.”
Nate was quiet for a moment. “That’s a good thing you did.”
“She would have done it for me. She would have done anything for me. She still would.”
“Still,” he said. “You’re a good friend.”
His compliment heated her face before she could do anything about it. She looked down at her plate and hoped the morning light was doing her a favor.
“Thank you for breakfast,” she said to her toast.
“You’re welcome,” he said to his coffee.
An hour later she was feeling well enough to move, which was the best she’d hoped for and better than she’d expected. She dressed in shorts, a tank top, a light sweater on top, and found Nate back at the small desk in the corner of the living room, laptop open, phone face-up beside it.
Work mode. Which meant he could be there for a good twelve hours.
She pulled on her shoes at the door. “I’m going down to the beach.”
“Mm.” He didn’t look up.
She watched him for a moment. The back of his neck, the set of his shoulders, the way his hand moved to his phone and back to the keyboard.
“You could come,” she said.
“I’ve got calls this afternoon.”
“It’s ten in the morning.”
“I know.” He did look up then, briefly. “Go. I’ll see you later.”
She turned back to the door. She hadn’t been going to say anything else — she genuinely hadn’t — but he must have caught something in the line of her shoulders as she turned, or the half-second pause before she reached for the door handle, because she heard his chair push back.
“How long?” he said.
She looked over her shoulder. “What?”
He was already closing the laptop. “The walk. How long?”
Something lifted in her chest. “An hour, maybe. Depending on how I feel.”
He looked at the closed laptop. He looked at the phone. He looked at her.
“Screw it,” he said. “Work can wait a while longer.”
She smiled before she could help it and turned back to the door before he could see how happy he’d just made her.
The path through the dune grass was narrow and sandy and took them down to the beach in single file, Nate just behind her. Abruptly, the sand opened out and the ocean was right there, the waves rolling in steadily.
They walked without a plan. Jasmine kept to the firmer sand near the waterline and let the sound of it settle over her. Her hips felt better in the open air. They usually did. Movement helped on the good days, which this was turning into.
Nate walked beside her with his hands in his jacket pockets, looking out at the water. He’d left his phone inside, she’d noticed. And been surprised by.
“Your grandmother,” she said. “Did she come here a lot?”
“Every summer.” He looked out at the horizon. “She used to swim in the mornings regardless of the temperature. She said cold water was good for the soul.”
“Was she right?”
“Probably.” He glanced sideways at her. “I’ve never tested it.”
She looked at the waves breaking white near her feet. The water came in and foamed around the edges of her shoes, and she stepped back, but not quite fast enough, and the cold soaked through one sock immediately.
“Oh, that’s freezing,” she said.
“I told you.”
“You didn’t tell me anything. You just implied it smugly.”
He laughed out loud. The next wave came in larger than the last and caught them both, and Jasmine shrieked at the cold of it and jumped back, which sent water splashing up onto both of them.
“That was your fault,” he said with a grin, looking down at his wet jeans.
“That was the ocean’s fault.”
“You jumped into me.”
“I was surprised.” She kicked a wave of water in his direction. “That’s for being smug about it.”
He looked at the water she’d sent at his shoes, and then he splashed directly toward her.
Screaming, she ran two steps up the sand and came back and sent an enormous splash back at him.
At this point they were both laughing and soaked to the knees and completely undignified about it.
Jasmine couldn’t have said exactly when the laughing took over from everything else, but at some point it did, fully and completely, the kind of laughing that didn’t leave room for anything else.
She stopped eventually, breathless, cold water seeping through both socks now, her hair pulled loose by the wind. Nate was standing a few feet away, looking equally ridiculous and not even slightly bothered about it.
She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt like this. Just happy. Plain and solid and real, standing on a cold beach with wet feet, laughing with a man she used to avoid and now couldn’t stop thinking about.
She looked at the ocean, wide and gray and going on forever.
And then she turned back to him and smiled. The wind came in off the water and the waves kept breaking, and for a little while that was all there was.