“I wasn’t asking because of the arrangement,” he said.
She turned from the fridge and looked at him for a moment, a container of grilled chicken and vegetables in her hand. Her eyes were still a little bright. She’d done an impressive job of clearing them in the span of about thirty seconds, which told him this was a skill she’d had reason to develop.
“I know you weren’t,” she said, and something in her voice had shifted, gone softer at the edges, less like armor. Then it came back. “I’m fine, Nate. Really.”
She set the food on the counter and turned to find a pan, and he watched her for a moment: the careful way she moved, the set of her shoulders, the way she kept her back to him while she got herself the rest of the way together.
And he felt the pull of wanting to push. To ask the real question rather than the polite one. It surprised him, that pull. He wasn’t someone who asked real questions. He didn’t, as a rule, go looking for things that weren’t his to carry.
But she’d been crying alone in his kitchen over something she’d called nothing, and he wasn’t entirely sure he believed her, and he cared about her.
A little bit. Not too much.
But care he did.
He also knew she didn’t like him. Whatever had just happened in this kitchen, whatever she was holding, she wasn’t going to hand it to him. Not now, maybe not ever. He’d forfeited that kind of trust six years ago and signed a contract that made them business partners, nothing else.
So he let it go. He watched her heat up the food and didn’t say anything else, and when she slid a plate in his direction a few minutes later without being asked, he took it, said thank you, and left it at that.
She sat down on the other side of the island, and they ate in silence, but it wasn’t the hostile kind. It was, if he was being precise about it, something that felt almost like two people who were tired in the same way at the end of the same long day.
There was something physical happening. He couldn’t have said exactly what tipped him off. The way she shifted her weight on the stool every few minutes, subtle enough that she probably didn’t know she was doing it. The way she’d reached for her tea mug with both hands wrapped around it, like the warmth helped. Once, when she thought he was looking at his phone, she pressed two fingers briefly against the side of her neck and closed her eyes for just a second.
It wasn’t work stress. Or it wasn’t only that.
He turned his phone over in his hands and said nothing, because the look on her face every time he’d come close to the edge of something real tonight had been the same look. Polite. Closed. The face of a person who had decided exactly how much ofthemselves this situation was going to get. He respected it. It was the same face he showed most of the world most of the time.
It was just strange to be on the receiving end of it.
“You should probably take something,” he said, without looking up from his phone.
A pause. “What?”
“For whatever’s hurting.” He kept his voice easy, like he was commenting on the weather. “I’m not asking what it is. Just saying. There’s a first aid cabinet above the second bathroom sink. Marisol keeps it stocked.”
The silence that followed was heavy. He could feel her annoyance.
“I’m fine,” Jasmine said.
“Sure,” he said.
She shifted on the stool again and said nothing else.
He let it go because she’d made clear enough that was what she wanted, and the least he could do at this point was want the things she wanted. He picked up his phone and scrolled without seeing anything for a while, and then he remembered something from earlier in the day and laughed before he could stop himself.
She looked over. “What?”
“Nothing. Something that happened today.”
She waited, which he took as permission.
“One of the companies in my building,” he said, setting his phone down, “has a guinea pig. Office pet. Apparently that’s athing people do now.” He’d been genuinely baffled to learn this. “Anyway, someone left the cage unlatched this morning and the thing got out. Spent about three hours loose somewhere in the building. They sent a facilities-wide email about a missing guinea pig named Gerald.”
Jasmine’s expression shifted slightly. “Gerald.”
“Gerald. Tan and white, answers to his name apparently, though I have doubts about that claim.” He leaned back in his seat. “So the whole building’s on alert. People checking the stairwells. Someone’s crying in the lobby, which… I’m not gonna comment on. Maybe this guinea pig really is that amazing, you know?”
Jasmine grinned. Buoyed, Nate went on.
