23. Nate
NATE
The sunset painted the beach in a kaleidoscope of bright colors. Standing on the deck, hands in his pockets, Nate breathed in the salty air. It was their last night at the beach house, and he’d never dreaded leaving a place so much.
At first, he’d been dreading coming out here.
He’d only decided on it because it seemed like the most practical thing to do.
Getting out of the city for a little while would throw Graham off any plan he currently had cooking to expose Nate.
Since very few people knew about this house and it was listed under Nate’s mother’s name, he was fairly confident that Graham wouldn’t find out about it.
So far, so good.
Actually… so far, so much better.
A figure on the beach caught Nate’s eye. Jasmine. Walking back from the water’s edge, the wind whipping hair around her face.
The sight of her sent a wave of relaxation through him.
The last week and a half suddenly seemed like it had lasted no more than a few hours.
The sleeping in. Cooking meals together.
Late-night board games. The few trips to town when they covered up to the point that it was comical — hats, glasses, wigs, the whole nine yards, anything to prevent a picture from getting out and alerting Graham to their location.
Nate wanted it all back. Every minute of it. He wished he could live those ten days on a loop for the rest of his life, his own personal Groundhog Day. Except he’d be in heaven, too happy to ever think of leaving.
“Hey,” Jasmine called from where the bottom of the steps met the sand. She jogged up to him, the soles of her sneakers creating a rhythmic pattern on the boards.
“Find anything good?”
“Check it out.” She extended her palm, revealing a sand dollar, only a little chipped, resting in the middle of it.
“Oh. Wow.” He gingerly lifted it from her hand and held it up to the dying light.
Jasmine turned around and leaned against the railing, her elbows propped up. The setting sun backlit her hair, making it look like she had a halo. “Can I tell you something crazy?”
“What?” He carefully placed the sand dollar on the railing next to her.
“I was apprehensive about coming here, but now I don’t want to leave.”
Nate burst into laughter.
“What?” She frowned. “Why are you laughing at me?”
“I’m laughing at myself,” he corrected. “No, the situation. I feel the same way.”
Her frown softened into something quieter. She turned back to the ocean, and he turned with her, and they stood side by side watching the last of the light move across the water.
“What is it about this place?” she asked after a while.
“No agenda.” He said it without thinking and then realized it was exactly right. “No photographers. No Dove calling about optics. No Graham.” He paused. “No performance.”
She was quiet for a moment. “We should go down,” she said. “Watch the sun finish from the sand.”
They went down the steps and settled at the base of the dune, close enough to the water that they could hear every wave but far enough that the tide wouldn’t reach them.
Jasmine pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them.
Nate sat beside her, close enough that their shoulders nearly touched, and watched the sun drop toward the line of the water.
“This time last week,” he said, “you were barely speaking to me.”
“This time last week you were barely speaking to me.”
“I was giving you space.”
“You were avoiding me,” she said, but there was warmth in it, not accusation.
“I was,” he agreed. “You make it difficult to keep a reasonable distance.”
She turned to look at him. “Do I?”
“You know you do.”
She looked back at the water, and the corner of her mouth moved in a way she was trying to suppress.
It was another one of those little quirks he appreciated about her.
Just like the way she laughed when something caught her off guard, the way she always made two cups of coffee even when she hadn’t been asked, the way she’d looked standing in the cold shallows with her sneakers soaked through, completely undignified and completely herself and more beautiful than anyone he’d ever stood next to.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said.
“Dangerous.”
“Probably.” He watched a pelican cruise low over the water and disappear. “I’ve been trying to remember the last time I went ten days without caring very much about work. And I can’t.”
“Not once?”
“Not once. Since I was… probably a teenager.” He turned the sand dollar over in his fingers. He’d picked it up from the railing on the way down without realizing. “I always thought the work was the point. That everything else was what you did while you were waiting to get back to it.”
“And now?”
He looked at her. She was watching him with the look that had unnerved him in the boardroom, but today he found he didn’t mind it at all. In fact, it would be nice if she never stopped looking at him.
“And now I’m not sure that’s true anymore,” he said.
She didn’t say anything. She waited.
“I don’t want to go back tomorrow,” he said. “Not because of Graham, not because of the arrangement. I just…” He stopped.
Outside of a business context, he was not a man who said the thing plainly. He’d never needed to be. But she’d told him vulnerable things in the lamplight, and he owed her the same. “I’d like to stay here. I… want this. Whatever this week has been. I want more of it.”
The sun was touching the water now, the light going deep and gold across everything, across the sand and the waves and her face when she turned toward him.
“Nate,” she said quietly, and there was something in the way she said it — careful, the way you were careful with something you didn’t want to break.
“I know,” he said. “I know what the arrangement is. I know what we agreed to.” He turned the sand dollar over once more, then set it down on the sand between them. “I also know that there’s no one I’d rather fake-marry than you. And that the fake part is starting to feel like the wrong word.”
There it was. The truth. What was on his mind. In his heart.
His pulse raced, and he wondered if he’d just said something that was sure to make him look a fool. Maybe she’d even laugh in his face.
But she just looked at him for a long moment. The ocean moved between them and the horizon. The sun kept going down.
“There are no cameras here,” she said. It wasn’t a warning. It was something more like a question.
“I know,” he said.
“Then why—”
“Because you’re the only person I want to be sitting here with. That’s the whole reason.”
She held his gaze, and he could see her working it out, the part of her that had spent weeks keeping him at arm’s length running calculations, and the part of her that had splashed him in the freezing shallows and laughed until she couldn’t breathe quietly declining to cooperate with it.
“You’re conflicted,” he said.
“I…” She caught her breath. “I was, yes. But if you’re saying that you feel the same way…” She searched his gaze, her eyes wide and hopeful, looking for confirmation.
He leaned in.
She put one hand briefly against his chest, not stopping him. Just feeling the fact of it. Then she looked up at him once more, and whatever she found there seemed to be enough, because she closed the remaining distance herself and kissed him.
It was nothing like the kiss at the magazine shoot, the one that had been brief and controlled and pointed at an audience.
This one was slow, and warm, and entirely private, with the sun going down behind them and the sand cold under his palms and the sounds of nature creating a musical score all around them.
When they pulled back, she was looking at him with an expression he hadn’t seen on her before. Open. Unguarded. The version of her that existed when there was nothing left to protect.
“Well,” she said quietly.
“Yeah,” he said.
The sun finished setting. The sky went pink and then deep blue, and neither of them moved to go inside.
The sand dollar sat between them on the sand catching the last of the light, and Nate thought that whatever came next — Graham, the wedding, the city, all of it — he was going to hold on to this particular hour for a very long time.