Fifteen minutes passed.
When he came back to the table, she had her hands in her lap and her face arranged into something neutral.
“Sorry,” he said, settling back into his seat. “Frankfurt.”
“Frankfurt.” She nodded slowly. “Right.”
Was that supposed to mean something to her? He’d said it like she should understand, like his work was so important that every person in the world was paying detailed attention to it.
He looked at her. “It was important.”
“It always is.” She kept her voice even. “That’s the thing, isn’t it? It was important six years ago, too. It’s always going to be important. There’s always going to be a Frankfurt.”
The air between them changed. She watched him understand what she was referencing, watched something close off behind his eyes.
“That’s not fair,” he said.
“Probably not.” She picked up her fork. “I’m just observing a pattern.”
“We have the rest of the night together, Jasmine. The call was legitimate business.”
“And business can never wait.” Her voice was still quiet, still level, because there were other diners around them and she was not going to become a scene. “I’m not asking you to stop being who you are. I’m just noting that you walked out of this dinner for fifteen minutes to take a call, and we have a lot riding on people believing we’re madly in love with each other, and maybe that’s something to think about.”
She was dancing around the real problem, which was that his choice had hurt her feelings terribly. She had pride, though. Perhaps too much of it.
“I was gone for ten minutes,” he scoffed.
“I know how long you were gone.”
He set his jaw. “I apologized.”
“I heard you.”
They ate in silence for a moment, the easy warmth of earlier thoroughly gone, replaced by the familiar friction that she’d been almost starting to forget about. Almost. It hadn’t taken long, had it, for the real version of them to come back?
Whatever she’d felt when his hand was over hers on the table, whatever had moved through her, was exactly the kind of feeling she could not afford. This was what he did. He made you feel like the only person in the room and then excused himself to take a call and came back expecting everything to be where he’d left it.
It was the same man. He hadn’t changed.
She had just, temporarily and foolishly, let herself forget that.
She became aware of something in her peripheral vision. A man at a table across the room, half-turned toward them with his phone angled in a way that she recognized. He was filming them but trying to make it seem like he was doing something else on his phone.
A lump formed in Jasmine’s throat.
“Someone’s recording us,” she said quietly.
Nate looked up without moving his head, found the man, and looked back at his plate. “I see him. How long has he been doing that?”
“I’m not sure,” she murmured.
Probably since they’d been bickering, in other words. The bad feeling spread outward from her chest. She couldn’t tell how much the man had gotten, whether the audio from across the room would be audible or just footage of two engaged people who were very clearly not having a lovely dinner. Either way, it was not the image they needed in circulation right now.
They finished the meal without saying much, keeping their voices low and their expressions neutral. She let him put his hand on her back when they left, smiled for the photographer waiting outside, but said nothing in the car on the way home.
At the house she went straight to her wing. She didn’t say goodnight. She heard him move through the kitchen, heard the sound of a glass, heard his footsteps eventually go the other way.
She sat on the edge of the bed in the dark, the same edge, the same dark, the position she seemed to end up in whenever this arrangement reminded her of what it actually was.
