“To Taylor Hartner,” Nate said, raising his glass.
Jasmine raised hers and touched it to his. “To Taylor Hartner.”
“And to passing a fitness test due to already being a superhero,” he added, with the dry edge she’d grown accustomed to.
She laughed despite herself. “I wouldn’t describe myself as that.”
“You came home looking like you’d survived something, and hours later they gave you the part, so.” He shrugged. “I’m putting it together.”
She shook her head and took a sip of wine, and the warmth of it and the candlelight and the relief that had been sitting in her chest since Marco’s call yesterday loosened something in her. She let herself be here, fully, without the usual low hum of anxiety running underneath everything.
“I keep waiting for someone to call back and say there’s been a mistake,” she admitted.
“There hasn’t been.”
She looked at him across the table. “That’s a very nice thing to say.”
“It’s an accurate thing to say.” He picked up his menu, the moment closed, the compliment delivered and immediately made businesslike, which was so entirely him that she almost smiled. “What are you eating?”
She was, she realized, genuinely having a good time. That was the thing she hadn’t expected when she’d agreed to this dinner: that it wouldn’t feel like an appointment. That she’d sit across from Nate in a candlelit restaurant and find herself actually present in it rather than managing it from a careful distance.
They talked about the film, about what training for the role would look like, about a director she admired who had done something similar with an actress a few years back. Nate had opinions, informed ones, which shouldn’t have surprised her but did. He talked about a documentary he’d watched recently. She told him about the book she’d been reading. He’d read it too, had a different take on the ending, and they went back and forth about it for ten minutes with the easy friction of two people who were used to being right and had met their match, and somewhere in the middle of it she laughed so hard at something he said that she had to put down her fork.
“That’s not what he meant, and you know it,” she said, still laughing.
“It’s absolutely what he meant. The whole second half of the book is right there in that one paragraph if you’d just?—”
“I read it, Nate.”
“You read it wrong.”
“You can’t read a novel wrong.”
“You can read it incompletely,” he said, and the straightness of his face while he said it made her laugh all over again.
When she looked up from it, his expression had shifted into something that wasn’t the dry boardroom version of him she’d started out with. It was softer. Unguarded, the way he got sometimes in the kitchen late at night when he’d forgotten to put the armor back on.
At some point his hand had found hers on top of the table. She wasn’t sure when it had happened. His thumb moved once, slowly, across her knuckles, and she looked down at their joinedhands and then back up at him. And for a long, suspended moment, neither of them said anything.
Was this for the benefit of the room? She couldn’t tell. She’d gotten good at reading the difference between the performed version of him and the real one, or she’d thought she had, but right now, in the candlelight with his hand warm over hers and his eyes on her face, she genuinely could not locate the seam between them.
What she could locate was what she was feeling. It moved through her like a steady wave. She was feeling something for him. Not residual warmth from the old weeks six years ago, not appreciation because he just happened to be the one in front of her. Something new. Something that had been building in the space of ordinary evenings and comfortable silences and small kindnesses.
The timing was, as always, impeccable.
She was trying to decide what to do with this new feeling when Nate’s phone buzzed on the table.
He glanced at it. She watched his jaw set in the particular way it did when work was pulling at him.
Jasmine bit her bottom lip. Was he seriously considering answering? This was supposed to be a night of celebration — he was the one who’d suggested it! — and she’d put her phone on mute and left it in her purse.
“I have to take this,” he said. “Two minutes.”
He was already sliding out of the booth.
She picked up her wine glass but didn’t drink. Instead, she stared at the candle in the middle of the table, wondering if shewas making too big a deal out of this. He’d said two minutes. He’d be right back.
But then two minutes stretched to five, and then to ten. She could see him from where she sat, standing near the entrance with one finger pressed to his ear, the body language of a man entirely elsewhere. The soft version of him that had been sitting across from her, the one with the unguarded eyes and the thumb moving across her knuckles, had packed itself away, and in its place was the one she’d met in the hallway of a party, the one who had a company to run and a world that apparently stopped for nothing, including a dinner he had invited her to.
