CHAPTER 24
JASMINE
The next morning, Jasmine was dragging her feet like a toddler who didn’t want to leave the best vacation of their short life. The whole walk to the car, she sulked.
“We’ll come back,” Nate said as he closed the trunk.
“Promise?” she teased.
“Promise,” he said, stepping closer and pulling her in with one smooth move. His hips bumped against hers, and his face ducked down, warm breath caressing her cheek.
Jasmine sucked in a quick breath, and the fear that she’d been trying to ignore all morning surfaced. What if they got back to the city and their time at the beach house proved to be temporary? For all she knew, this had been a tiny fling for Nate, and he didn’t intend to continue it once they returned to regular life.
The thought was a knife twisting in her heart. She’d opened herself up to him, sharing about her diagnosis and kissing him, and knowing that it could all end in rejection made her feel like she might be sick.
“What’s on your mind?” Nate asked. He pulled back slightly to get a better look at her, his brow knit.
She swallowed hard and fought the knee-jerk response to saynothing. You had to be clear about what you wanted in life in order to get it.
Even if taking that risk sometimes felt like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute.
“What was this to you?” she asked. “Yesterday.”
He blinked, processing. “Jasmine…”
A knot formed in her belly, and she quickly shook her head. The tone of his voice was all wrong, like he was winding up to let her down, and she couldn’t stomach a “letting you down easy” talk.
“It’s fine,” she said, course-correcting and stepping back from him. “You don’t have to answer that. We had a nice time, and now we need to get back to real life.”
“Stop.” His hand caught hers before she’d taken a full step back. Not tight. Just enough. “I was trying to figure out how to say this without making a mess of it.”
She looked down at their joined hands and then back up at him.
“I’m genuinely into you,” he said. “Not because of the arrangement. Not because of the bet or Graham or any of it. Just you. I’ve been into you since before I knew what to do with it, and the last ten days have made it fairly impossible to keep pretending otherwise.”
She opened her mouth and found she had nothing ready.
“I also owe you something I should have said a long time ago.” He kept hold of her hand. “The restaurant. Six years ago.” Hisjaw tightened slightly, the way he did when he was frustrated, except now she suspected the frustration was aimed at himself.
“I forgot,” he said. “That’s the honest truth, and I know it’s the worst version of the story because it means you weren’t even on my mind enough to stand you up deliberately. You just weren’t there in my thinking, and that was wrong. You deserved better than that. You deserved to be on someone’s mind.” He paused. “I’m sorry. Genuinely.”
The knot in her belly loosened slowly, like a fist unclenching finger by finger.
She’d carried that particular piece of the story for six years. Not the anger of it, which had faded long ago, but the smaller wound underneath. The one that saidyou weren’t worth remembering.She hadn’t realized until this moment, standing in the sandy driveway with Nate, how much she’d still been holding it.
“Okay,” she said quietly.
“Okay?”
“Okay, I accept the apology. Thank you.” She looked at him. “And okay, I would like to give this a real shot. If that’s what you’re asking.”
Something moved through his expression that she thought might have been relief. “That’s what I’m asking.”
“Then, yes.” She squeezed his hand once and let it go, and a wave of giddiness passed through her.
It felt like they’d just turned the page and started a whole new crazy, thrilling chapter of life. She wasn’t sure what came next, but she didn’t even want to blink in case she missed a millisecond of it.
He laughed, and she smiled, and they got in the car, and the beach house disappeared in the rearview mirror as they turned onto the private road. Jasmine looked back at it once, knowing that she would remember the week and a half they’d shared there for the rest of her life.
