Nate was not a man she should fall for. She’d known it before tonight, had told herself as much on a number of occasions, and tonight had simply confirmed it in technicolor. He was a man who would always choose the deal. The work that had been there before her and would be there after.
A woman could spend a very long time waiting for a man like that to show up completely, and she had too much to protect — her health, her career, her heart — to be that woman.
She fell back on the bed without taking her shoes off and stared at the ceiling for a long time.
CHAPTER 16
JASMINE
The coffee shop Eden chose was a small place in Silver Lake, the kind with mismatched chairs and a chalkboard menu out front. It was the sort of neighborhood where nobody looked twice at anyone, which was the whole reason Jasmine loved it. She could sit here in sunglasses and a baseball cap and be entirely unremarkable, which was its own kind of luxury.
She wrapped both hands around her cup and watched Eden across the small table.
“So what’s new?” Eden asked, leaning back in her chair and embracing the sunshine coming through the window.
“I think I’m developing feelings for him.”
Eden’s expression didn’t change by so much as a millimeter. She took a slow sip of her cortado and set it down. “Okay.”
“You don’t sound surprised.”
Eden smiled the smallest bit. “I’m not.”
“I’m nipping it in the bud,” Jasmine added. “I just wanted you to know, because you’re the only person I can tell, and it felt like the kind of thing that needed to be said out loud at least once before I stuff it down into a dark chest in my soul.”
“Right.” Eden turned her cup in a slow circle on the table. “And you think you can just do that? Nip it in the bud?”
“I have to.”
“That’s not what I asked. You’re smart, Jasmine. You know that repressing feelings doesn’t work. It makes people sick.”
Jasmine pulled her sunglasses up and rubbed the bridge of her nose. Outside the window, Silver Lake went about its Saturday morning unhurriedly. A man walked a very small dog. Two women pushed strollers side by side, deep in conversation. Normal life, proceeding normally, entirely indifferent to the mess she’d managed to make of her interior landscape in the space of a few weeks.
“He took a work call,” she said. “In the middle of dinner. And then had the nerve to act like I was being unreasonable when I pointed it out.”
“That does sound annoying.”
“It’s more than annoying. It’s a pattern. It’s who he is.” She set her sunglasses back down. “He’s the same man who stood me up six years ago because the work was more important, Eden. He hasn’t changed. Last night just reminded me of that.”
“Or,” Eden said, in the careful voice she used when she was about to say something Jasmine wasn’t going to like, “last night reminded you that you have feelings for him, which then made the phone call hurt more than it would have otherwise.”
Jasmine opened her mouth.
“I’m not defending him,” Eden said quickly. “Taking a call mid-dinner is rude regardless. I’m just saying that the reason it landed so hard is probably information worth having.”
“The information I have is that he’s not available. Not really. Not in the way that matters.” Jasmine picked up her coffee. “His work will always come first. I’ve seen it every day for the past few weeks. He’s up before I am, and he’s still on his laptop when I go to bed. His phone never stops, and that’s fine because that’s his life. But it’s not a life that leaves room for an actual person in it. And I have enough to manage without adding unrequited feelings for my fake husband to the list.”
“Who says they’re unrequited?”
Jasmine sucked in a long breath. No. She wouldn’t allow herself to entertain that possibility. Couldn’t allow it. “Eden,” she said as a warning.
“I’m just asking.”
“They’re unrequited,” Jasmine said firmly. “He held my hand at dinner and I read into it, which is my own fault, and now I’m correcting course. That’s all this is. A correction.”
Eden looked at her with the expression she’d been wearing for the better part of a decade, the one that meantI love you and I think you’re lying to yourself, but I’ll let you get there in your own time.She’d perfected it somewhere around year three of their friendship.
“Fine,” Eden said. “You’re nipping it. Consider it nipped.”
