“Closer,” Dove said.
They moved again. Now they were touching, shoulder to shoulder, the warmth of her arm against his sleeve. He kept his eyes forward.
“Eye contact,” Dove said. “When you talk to each other, you look at each other. Like you can’t help it. That’s the thing you’re selling.”
Nate turned to look at Jasmine. She turned to look at him at the same moment, and it was… strange. He’d looked at her across a boardroom table and across a patio and through the dim of a crowded restaurant. He hadn’t done this: looked at her from a few inches away, in daylight, with no argument. Her eyes were darker than he remembered. He’d forgotten that.
“Hold hands,” Dove said.
Jasmine didn’t move. Neither did he.
“We’re not doing that,” Jasmine said in a pleasant voice.
“You absolutely are,” Dove said in the same tone. “Carla will be watching where your hands go. When you’re nervous, you reach for each other. That’s what couples do. So. Hands.”
A pause. Then Jasmine set her glass down and held out her hand, palm up, and looked at him with an expression that said: “Don’t make this weird.”
He took it.
Her hand was cool from the glass and her grip light, and he looked down at their joined hands for a moment longer than was necessary before he looked back up at her. She was already looking at him. He watched something move across her face that she didn’t entirely hide before she smoothed it over.
“See,” Dove said softly. “That’s the look. That’s what they’re going to photograph.”
Jasmine withdrew her hand. Casually, easily, like it hadn’t meant anything, like she’d simply finished with it. She picked her glass back up. Nate flexed his fingers once against his knee and said nothing.
“Last thing,” Dove said. “The kiss.”
“No,” Jasmine said immediately.
“Just a small one. A greeting, a goodbye. Carla will almost certainly?—”
“I’m an actress,” Jasmine said. “I’ve played love scenes with men I met twenty minutes before the camera rolled. I don’t need to rehearse.” She turned to look at Nate, calm and certain. “When the moment calls for it, I’ll handle it. You don’t need to worry.”
He wasn’t worried about that. Something else warmed his chest that he didn’t want to think about, and he didn’t want to examine the feeling too closely.
“Fair enough,” Dove said and recapped her pen.
Carla arrived twenty minutes later with a photographer and two assistants, and Nate spent the first several minutes quietly braced for catastrophe. From the moment Carla sat downacross from them and asked her first question, however, Jasmine became someone else entirely. Not a different person; something more unnerving than that. The same person, but unlocked. Warmer.
She laughed easily and leaned into him at the right moments and told the garlic bread story as if it were the funniest thing she had ever witnessed, and Carla laughed along with her. Nate realized something unsettling was happening. He was relaxing. There was no effort in it. She made it effortless.
She said his name with an ease that made it sound like a word she’d always known, and when she talked about him, she did it the way people talked about someone they’d chosen deliberately. He found himself listening to her the same way Carla did, which was not something he’d planned.
When Carla asked him what he loved about her, he opened his mouth, and the honest answer arrived before any prepared one could.
“She says exactly what she thinks,” he said. “She always has. I don’t meet many people who’ll tell me the truth without dressing it up first.”
Jasmine turned to look at him. Something flickered behind her eyes that he couldn’t name.
“He’s not as difficult as advertised,” she told Carla, with a smile he felt as well as saw. “There’s actually a softie beneath that hard exterior.”
Carla wrote something in her notebook and underlined it twice. When the interview wrapped up, she shook both their hands and told them the piece was going to be wonderful, and then shepassed them off to the photographer, who took them out to the garden for the shoot.
The photographs were taken in the last of the afternoon light, the city spilling away below the ridge behind them. The photographer put them close together along the garden wall and told them to ignore him entirely, which was, Nate supposed, easier said than done. He stood at Jasmine’s side and looked out at the view, and she leaned her shoulder into his and said something quietly to herself. He glanced down to hear it, but she’d already stopped. Her profile was still. She was looking out at the city with an expression that was softer than anything she’d worn in his presence before, as though she’d momentarily forgotten to be guarded, as though she’d simply looked at the view and found it beautiful.
He was watching that expression when she turned toward him, closed the remaining inch between them, and kissed him.
It was brief. A press of lips, the barest warmth of it, done in a second. She pulled back and returned her eyes to the horizon, calm and composed, as if she’d done nothing more than step over a puddle. His heart did something that shocked him, a flip and a little jig.
