Page 40 of The Bride Bet
“No amount of it stops the feeling,” she said quietly.
“No,” he said. “It doesn’t.”
They sat with that. The lamp made everything amber and soft, and the ocean kept going outside, steady and indifferent and enormous.
He thought about all the evenings at the penthouse, the ones that ended with him still at his desk at two in the morning because the alternative was facing how lonely it was at the top. He’d called that productive. He’d called it necessary. Sitting here now, in a house that was a fraction of the size, with a woman who had just exposed her heart to him, he wasn’t entirely sure what to call it anymore.
She didn’t get up, and he didn’t reach for his book.
“Thank you,” she said after a while. “For not making it into something manageable. People do that. They hear something hard and immediately want to solve it.”
“I’m not sure I could solve this one,” he said.
“No.” There was something almost like warmth in it. “But you didn’t try. That’s the part that matters.”
He looked at her, and she looked back. The distance they’d gotten so good at maintaining, and always dancing around, seemed like it had never existed in the first place.
Nate briefly wondered what would have happened all those years ago if he’d gone to their dinner. If he’d stayed for the next night. And the next.
Would they not have two separate lives now, but one?
It was too big, too vague a question. The kind that would never be answered, and so he let it go.
They stayed there a while longer, in the quiet and the lamplight, and something that had been held carefully at a distance between them moved a little closer.
CHAPTER 22
JASMINE
Jasmine awoke to the smell of toast.
For a moment she didn’t move, just lay there with her eyes closed and let the smell reach her. Toast… and coffee, and beneath both of those the salt air coming through the gap in the window she’d left cracked overnight because the sound of the ocean helped her sleep. She’d slept better than she had in weeks. Longer, too. The heavy, dreamless kind that her body had been quietly begging for and that she’d been too wound up to give it.
Then she heard Nate in the kitchen, the soft clink of things being moved around, and remembered where she was and who was making breakfast.
She sat up slowly, taking inventory the way she did every morning now. What hurt, what didn’t. Her shoulders were stiff. Her hips less so than yesterday, which was something. The fog was thin this morning, which was the thing she was most grateful for. She could think clearly, which meant she could be a person rather than a performance of one.
She was reaching for her robe when Nate called from the other side of the door. “May I come in?”
He hadn’t asked to enter her room since they’d arrived here, and for a second she was too surprised to say anything. Recovering herself, she pulled on her robe. “Yeah, sure.”
Nate came in sideways, managing the door with his elbow because both hands were occupied with a tray. On it were two plates, two coffee mugs, and a small glass of orange juice.
He stopped as the door finished swinging itself open. “I didn’t know how you took your coffee.”
“Milk, no sugar.” She stared at the tray. “Nate. You didn’t have to?—”
“I know, but I wanted to.” He carefully set the tray on the end of the bed, determined not to spill anything. “There wasn’t much in the kitchen, so it’s just toast and eggs, but?—”
“It’s perfect,” she said.
He looked up at her. Something crossed his face briefly that she didn’t have a name for yet. Then he sat on the edge of the bed on top of the covers, leaving a careful distance between them, and handed her a mug.
Jasmine wrapped both hands around it and looked down at the tray and felt something move through her that was inconvenient and warm and entirely beyond her current ability to nip.
They ate together, the tray between them, his knee a few inches from hers on top of the duvet. Outside the window the ocean was gray and bright at the same time, the way it got on mornings when the sun was behind clouds. A seagull went past the window.
“Can I ask you something?” she said, halfway through the cup of coffee.
