She managed to say the right things to Marco and ended the call, and when she lowered the phone, Nate was watching her from across the island with his coffee suspended halfway to his mouth.
“Good news?” he asked.
“I got the part.” It came out unsteady. She didn’t care. “The superhero role. I got it.”
He set the coffee down and stood up from his stool, and before she was even sure what he was doing, he’d crossed the kitchen. She stepped toward him, and then his arms were around her and her face was against his shoulder.
He was warm. Solid. The kind of man Jasmine wanted to sink into.
It lasted about four seconds before she realized what she was doing.
They both stepped back at the same moment, and there was a beat where neither of them quite looked at the other directly.
“Congratulations,” he said. His voice was slightly lower than usual. “Really. That’s… Jasmine, that’s huge.”
“Thank you.” She was looking somewhere near his collarbone. “It is. It really is.”
“We should celebrate. Dinner tonight, we can make it a proper?—”
“I promised Eden,” she said. “If I got it, Eden gets the first celebration. We already discussed it.” She finally looked up athim, and there was something almost apologetic in it, which surprised her. “And we already met our quota for outings this week, right?”
A look crossed his face and was gone before she could identify it. He looked back at his laptop. “Right, of course,” he said, not looking at her.
She stood there for a moment in the kitchen that had started to feel less like a stranger’s, holding the best news she’d had in years, and watched him settle back onto his stool and scroll through something on his screen that she suspected he wasn’t really reading. There was something almost boyish about it, about the way he was pretending very hard to be absorbed in whatever was in front of him. She’d rattled him, she realized. Not with the news. With the hug, or the Eden comment, or both. She wasn’t entirely sure which, and she wasn’t sure she had the energy to untangle it right now.
And perhaps she didn’t want to. Ever.
“Nate,” she said.
He looked up.
“Thank you. For being happy for me. It meant something.”
“How about we go out and celebrate tomorrow night?” he asked. “Off the quota?”
She laughed. It came out easily, which still surprised her sometimes, how easy it had become to laugh in this kitchen, in this house that had started out feeling like a very beautiful cell.
Was this the start of a friendship? She thought it might be. That was something she hadn’t entirely planned for when she’dsigned the papers, and she wasn’t sure yet if it was a good idea or not.
In some ways, it would be easier to keep her distance. Cleaner.
But also, they would be living together for over a year. If they avoided each other while at home, it would get incredibly lonely.
“That sounds good,” she said. “I’d like that.”
He held her gaze for a moment. “Go shower,” he said. “You’ve earned it.”
She smiled and went, and she was almost all the way down the hallway before she let herself feel the full size of the day. The aching body, the phone call, the sensation of being held. By the time she reached her room, her chest was warm.
CHAPTER 15
JASMINE
The restaurant Nate chose was the kind of place that was trying extremely hard in ways designed to look effortless. Exposed brick and candlelight and a menu that described everything in three words when ten would have been clearer. The kind of place a man took a woman when he wanted to impress her without appearing to want to impress her.
Jasmine wasn’t sure if that counted as romantic or exhausting. Possibly both.
They were seated in a corner booth, partially sheltered from the room, which she appreciated. It felt less like a performance than their usual outings. No carpet, no press line, just two people at a table with good wine and the hum of other people’s conversations around them. Dove had tipped off one photographer, who had gotten what he needed from the arrival and then left them to it. That was the amount of public exposure Jasmine could tolerate. The kind where she got to eat her actual meal.
