“Go ahead.”
“When you first came to LA. What was it actually like? Your life?”
He considered that for a moment. “Cheap,” he said. “Mainly. I couldn’t afford furniture for the first two years. I had a mattress on the floor and two plastic crates from a hardware store that I used as a desk.”
She turned to look at him. “Plastic crates.”
“One for the laptop and one for the monitor.” He said it plainly, no performance of humility in it. “I ate a lot of instant noodles. I kept the heat off to save money when it got in the forties in the winter. Only ran the air conditioning when I absolutely had to.”
She laughed, and he almost smiled, and the morning felt easy in a way that she hadn’t been expecting and didn’t want to examine too closely in case the examining ruined it.
“Eden and I didn’t have a couch,” she offered. “Our whole living room was two cushions on the floor. We told ourselves it was a Japanese minimalist thing, but really we just couldn’t afford it.”
“Did it work? The minimalist angle?”
“For about a week. Then we started calling it what it was.” She picked up her toast. “She still lives simply. By choice now, not necessity. She never really wanted the big life.” She paused, thinking of Eden’s glowing face over the cortado, the photograph of Daniel on her phone. “She’s happy. Genuinely. I think some people just know what they need, and she’s always been one of them.”
“But you help her out,” Nate said. “Don’t you?”
She looked at him. “How did you?—”
“The way you talk about her.” He shrugged. “I’m guessing.”
Jasmine set her mug down on the tray. “When I got my first big paycheck, the first thing I did was go to a furniture store and buy Eden an entire apartment’s worth of furniture. Sofa, bed frame, proper dining table. Everything.” She picked her mug back up. “She cried. I cried. The delivery men were very uncomfortable.”
Nate was quiet for a moment. “That’s a good thing you did.”
“She would have done it for me. She would have done anything for me. She still would.”
“Still,” he said. “You’re a good friend.”
His compliment heated her face before she could do anything about it. She looked down at her plate and hoped the morning light was doing her a favor.
“Thank you for breakfast,” she said to her toast.
“You’re welcome,” he said to his coffee.
An hour later she was feeling well enough to move, which was the best she’d hoped for and better than she’d expected. She dressed in shorts, a tank top, a light sweater on top, and found Nate back at the small desk in the corner of the living room, laptop open, phone face-up beside it.
Work mode. Which meant he could be there for a good twelve hours.
She pulled on her shoes at the door. “I’m going down to the beach.”
“Mm.” He didn’t look up.
She watched him for a moment. The back of his neck, the set of his shoulders, the way his hand moved to his phone and back to the keyboard.
“You could come,” she said.
“I’ve got calls this afternoon.”
“It’s ten in the morning.”
“I know.” He did look up then, briefly. “Go. I’ll see you later.”
She turned back to the door. She hadn’t been going to say anything else — she genuinely hadn’t — but he must have caught something in the line of her shoulders as she turned, or the half-second pause before she reached for the door handle, because she heard his chair push back.
“How long?” he said.
