24. Jasmine
JASMINE
The next morning, Jasmine was dragging her feet like a toddler who didn’t want to leave the best vacation of their short life. The whole walk to the car, she sulked.
“We’ll come back,” Nate said as he closed the trunk.
“Promise?” she teased.
“Promise,” he said, stepping closer and pulling her in with one smooth move. His hips bumped against hers, and his face ducked down, warm breath caressing her cheek.
Jasmine sucked in a quick breath, and the fear that she’d been trying to ignore all morning surfaced.
What if they got back to the city and their time at the beach house proved to be temporary?
For all she knew, this had been a tiny fling for Nate, and he didn’t intend to continue it once they returned to regular life.
The thought was a knife twisting in her heart. She’d opened herself up to him, sharing about her diagnosis and kissing him, and knowing that it could all end in rejection made her feel like she might be sick.
“What’s on your mind?” Nate asked. He pulled back slightly to get a better look at her, his brow knit.
She swallowed hard and fought the knee-jerk response to say nothing. You had to be clear about what you wanted in life in order to get it.
Even if taking that risk sometimes felt like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute.
“What was this to you?” she asked. “Yesterday.”
He blinked, processing. “Jasmine…”
A knot formed in her belly, and she quickly shook her head. The tone of his voice was all wrong, like he was winding up to let her down, and she couldn’t stomach a “letting you down easy” talk.
“It’s fine,” she said, course-correcting and stepping back from him. “You don’t have to answer that. We had a nice time, and now we need to get back to real life.”
“Stop.” His hand caught hers before she’d taken a full step back. Not tight. Just enough. “I was trying to figure out how to say this without making a mess of it.”
She looked down at their joined hands and then back up at him.
“I’m genuinely into you,” he said. “Not because of the arrangement. Not because of the bet or Graham or any of it. Just you. I’ve been into you since before I knew what to do with it, and the last ten days have made it fairly impossible to keep pretending otherwise.”
She opened her mouth and found she had nothing ready.
“I also owe you something I should have said a long time ago.” He kept hold of her hand. “The restaurant. Six years ago.” His jaw tightened slightly, the way he did when he was frustrated, except now she suspected the frustration was aimed at himself.
“I forgot,” he said. “That’s the honest truth, and I know it’s the worst version of the story because it means you weren’t even on my mind enough to stand you up deliberately.
You just weren’t there in my thinking, and that was wrong.
You deserved better than that. You deserved to be on someone’s mind. ” He paused. “I’m sorry. Genuinely.”
The knot in her belly loosened slowly, like a fist unclenching finger by finger.
She’d carried that particular piece of the story for six years.
Not the anger of it, which had faded long ago, but the smaller wound underneath.
The one that said you weren’t worth remembering.
She hadn’t realized until this moment, standing in the sandy driveway with Nate, how much she’d still been holding it.
“Okay,” she said quietly.
“Okay?”
“Okay, I accept the apology. Thank you.” She looked at him. “And okay, I would like to give this a real shot. If that’s what you’re asking.”
Something moved through his expression that she thought might have been relief. “That’s what I’m asking.”
“Then, yes.” She squeezed his hand once and let it go, and a wave of giddiness passed through her.
It felt like they’d just turned the page and started a whole new crazy, thrilling chapter of life. She wasn’t sure what came next, but she didn’t even want to blink in case she missed a millisecond of it.
He laughed, and she smiled, and they got in the car, and the beach house disappeared in the rearview mirror as they turned onto the private road. Jasmine looked back at it once, knowing that she would remember the week and a half they’d shared there for the rest of her life.
The city arrived gradually, first the traffic thickening, then the buildings multiplying, then the full familiar sprawl of it spreading out in every direction like it had never stopped and never would.
Jasmine watched it come and felt the mixture of things she always felt when returning to LA.
The electricity of it. The weight of it.
The way it immediately asked more of you the moment you crossed back into its orbit.
They stopped for coffee in Silver Lake, a small place she liked where nobody generally looked twice at anyone.
Nate ordered for both of them without asking, because she’d told him her order once, two weeks ago, and he’d remembered.
They moseyed out of the coffee shop and onto the sidewalk, close together, her shoulder against his arm, the morning mild and unhurried around them.
He said something dry about the drive and she laughed, and he looked down at her, the way he’d started doing at the beach house, and she looked up at the same moment, and it was the most natural thing in the world that he kissed her there on the sidewalk with the coffee warm in their hands and Silver Lake going about its Saturday morning around them.
She kissed him back. A real kiss. Not for the cameras, not for the rest of the world. Just for the two of them.
The drive up to the ridge took twenty minutes, and they spent it the way they’d spent the drive up from the coast. Easy, unhurried, the radio low.
Jasmine had her feet tucked up and was telling him about the time Eden had tried to teach her to surf in Malibu, and how it was one of those experiences that feels traumatizing at the time and makes for a good story later.
“I looked like I was drowning out there,” Jasmine said. “But I wasn’t. The lifeguards came anyway, and by the time they got to me, my wetsuit was ripped in two. It was so embarrassing.”
Nate laughed into his hand. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t laugh.”
“No, it’s funny. Mortifying but funny.”
“I will never get on a surfboard again. Mark my words.”
The street curved, and she realized they were back at his house. The drive had seemed to take hardly any time at all.
Not only that, there were cars and people on this side of the gate.
Jasmine stiffened. “What’s going on?”
Nate didn’t answer. He was too busy surveying the scene as well, slowing down the car.
Journalists. Not one, not a stray photographer who’d gotten lucky with a tip.
Seven of them, maybe eight, clustered on the verge outside the gate with cameras and microphones.
There was a restless energy about them, and the moment they saw Nate’s car, they turned into vultures.
They surged forward, lenses coming up, two of them stepping directly into the road.
“Windows up,” Nate said. His voice had changed entirely. Flat and focused, all the ease of the last ten days gone in an instant.
Jasmine had already pressed the button. She kept her face turned slightly from the glass, her pulse climbing. There had been paparazzi outside of the house before, but this was something entirely different. Journalists didn’t show up unless there was a story to be had.
The voices came through the rolled-up windows, muffled but audible, calling both their names, shouting questions she couldn’t fully make out.
“This isn’t the usual,” she said, watching them through the glass as the car moved slowly forward.
“I know.” He kept his eyes forward, his hand steady on the wheel.
The gate opened on the sensor and they pulled through. It closed behind them, cutting off most of the noise.
The security guard in the post shook his head at Nate, lips pursed. Nate rolled down his window.
“They’ve been there for hours,” the guard said. “The police said they can’t do anything about it since they’re on the other side of the fence.”
Nate sighed. “Thanks anyway.”
They continued up the driveway to the house. Nate parked, turned off the engine, and sat for a moment without moving, both hands still on the wheel.
The quiet inside the car felt different from the quiet they’d had all week. Heavier. Jasmine looked at his profile, the jaw set, the eyes fixed somewhere in the middle distance.
“Nate.” Her voice came out smaller than she meant it to. “What’s happening?”
He didn’t answer, which was its own kind of answer. He reached for his phone from the cupholder, looked at the screen, and she saw the worry in his face.
The phone rang in his hand before he could dial out. He looked at the screen again, and the muscle in his jaw worked once.
He answered. Listened. She watched his face as he did, and she could read enough of it now, after weeks of learning him, to feel the cold start to move through her before a single word had been said. His eyes found hers across the car, and what was in them made her stomach drop.
He lowered the phone.
The morning sat around them and the city spread below the ridge exactly as it always had, but Jasmine had a feeling that everything in their world was suddenly different.
“We have a problem,” he said.