“Nate,” Jasmine’s mom said. “So good to see you.”
“You, too,” he said, his voice sounding raspy and winded.
He was in the same suit from the press conference, tie loosened. He looked at her mother first, a quick, grateful look, and then his eyes found Jasmine across the room and stayed there.
Her mother patted his arm and walked past him toward the kitchen. “I’ll be watering my plants. Holler if you need anything.”
Neither of them spoke for a moment.
Nate came into the room slowly, not crowding her, and stopped a few feet from where she stood at the window.
Jasmine swallowed hard. “We just watched your press conference.”
“I meant it,” he said. “All of it.”
“I know.” Her voice came out quieter than she’d intended.
“I’m sorry, for all of it. The bet. The emails. The restaurant six years ago. Telling you that you knew the risks when whatyou needed was for someone to just say that it wasn’t fair.” He stopped. “It wasn’t fair, Jasmine. None of what happened to you was fair, and you deserved to hear that from me a long time before now.”
She looked at him and felt the last carefully constructed piece of the wall she’d been maintaining start to come down. There was no use. She simply couldn’t fight it anymore.
“I love you,” he said. He took a breath. “I can’t imagine my life without you in it. I don’t want to try.” He paused. “I know I have things to fix. I know there’s damage, and I know it’s mine to repair. I know it takes more than a press conference and showing up at your mother’s door. But I am here, and I am asking, and I will do whatever it takes for however long it takes.”
She looked at him for a long moment. This man who had frustrated her and infuriated her and surprised her, who had brought her breakfast on a tray and remembered her coffee order and laughed over a guinea pig named Gerald, who had sat with her in lamplight at one in the morning and admitted to being afraid, who had just stood in front of the world and chosen honesty because she was worth that much to him.
“I love you too,” she said. “I have for a while. I was just waiting for it to be safe enough to say.”
Something in his face opened. She’d watched him go careful and controlled in difficult moments, watched him maintain composure under pressure and conditions that would have cracked other people. This was the opposite of that. This was just him, undone slightly, by three sentences.
He crossed the room and she met him halfway, because that was always how it was supposed to work, and when his arms camearound her, she pressed her face into the warm, solid reality of him and breathed him in. The relief that washed over her was the feeling of being exactly where she was supposed to be.
“Your mother called me,” he said into her hair.
“I suspected as much.”
“Twenty minutes before the press conference.”
She pulled back to look at him. “She called you before?”
“She said, and I’m quoting directly,you’d better say something worth saying.” He looked at her with the almost-smile. “I did my best.”
She laughed, and he pulled her back in. From the kitchen doorway came the extremely unsubtle sound of her mother making anawwnoise.
“Mom,” Jasmine said.
“I’m making coffee,” her mother said with perfect innocence.
“You’ve already got coffee.”
“I’m making more.”
Nate laughed against her temple, warm and low, and she shook her head and held on. The world that had felt entirely broken just days ago was still broken in places, still had work to do, still had a house on a listing and a career that needed rebuilding and a body that would need managing every day for the rest of her life.
But she would not do any of it alone.
She’d known that once before, had felt it in her mother’s voice on the phone and in Eden’s arms in the doorway, and she felt it again now, more completely, in the arms of a man who had driven across the city to confess his love to her.
She was going to be okay.
