Page 32 of The Bride Bet
“Eden,” Jasmine said. “You really like him.”
“I really like him,” Eden confirmed, in a voice she was clearly trying to keep casual and failing completely. “His name is Daniel. He’s a sound engineer. He made me laugh so hard on the second date that I cried, like actually cried, and I thought that was embarrassing, but he said it was his favorite thing that had happened to him all year, so.”
“So,” Jasmine echoed.
“So I think maybe.” Eden took the phone back and looked at the photo herself for a moment, the way people looked at things they were still getting used to. “I don’t want to jinx it by saying it out loud.”
“Then don’t. Just keep looking at him like that.”
Eden laughed and put her phone away, and they talked about Daniel for a while. Eden told her about his family, which was a big one that he was close to and had Sunday dinner with every week. She hadn’t met them yet, but Daniel had mentioned that he’d like to bring her to one of the dinners at some point soon. Jasmine listened and asked the right questions and felt, underneath all of it, a feeling she wasn’t proud of but recognized instantly.
Jealousy.
Not of Eden specifically, not of Daniel with his easy smile. Of the thing itself. The uncomplicated, terrifying, wonderful thing of falling for someone who was available to be fallen for. The freedom of it. You could like a person and tell your best friend about it over lunch with nothing underneath the story except the story itself. No contracts. No clauses. No hundred million dollars, a one-year term, and a clean exit at the end.
No man who was handsome and witty, but who could burn you at a moment’s notice, who would leave you behind for a work call. Who would shutter you from his life with no warning at all because further success was always another step away and if you weren’t meant to be a part of it, well, too bad.
Jasmine wanted what Eden had, what it felt like half the women in the world had. She’d always wanted it, in the abstract, the way everyone wanted it. But sitting here across from Eden with her glowing face and her carefully guarded hope, she felt the wanting sharply and specifically, like a bruise pressed on.
She’d thought, briefly — stupidly, she now understood — that something real between her and Nate might have been possible. In the spaces between the performing and the bickering, in the kitchen late at night and the car rides and her mother’s sofa with the photo album, she’d let herself wonder. She’d felt things she had no business feeling and filed them underto be dealt with laterand kept going, and at some pointlaterhad arrived and the feelings were still there, unchanged and inconvenient and pointed directly at a man who answered his phone at dinner and kept his house like a museum and had made it extremely clear from the beginning that this was a transaction, nothing more.
That didn’t seem possible anymore. The wondering felt naive in the light of someone entering a relationship that was honest and real. Nate was who he was. She’d always known who he was.
A cutthroat billionaire. The kind of man who had no problem burning bridges and leaving people in his dust. He didn’t wait for anyone, and that’s why he’d been so successful in life.
She was giving up a year, and with it whatever chances the year might have held for something real. That was the trade she’d made, and it was the right trade, and she was going to stopsitting in the sun feeling sorry about it because it didn’t change anything.
“You’ve gone quiet,” Eden observed. “Is everything okay? God, am I talking too much about myself?” She buried her face in her hands. “I’m sorry. This day is supposed to be about you. It’s the day you try on wedding dresses, and here I am?—”
“It’s okay,” Jasmine interrupted. “Really.” She lowered her voice so they wouldn’t be overheard. “Today isn’t real. This wedding dress doesn’t count.”
Eden’s face fell, and Jasmine realized that her friend felt sorry for her.
Jasmine waved her hand. “One day, I’ll have a real wedding. We’ll pick out a real wedding dress together, and that will be a day to celebrate.”
“Are you sure I’m not hogging the attention?” Eden asked, a blush still on her cheeks.
“I’m happy for you,” Jasmine said and meant it, fully and without reservation, even with the jealousy underneath. “I really am.”
Eden looked at her for a moment with the eyes that saw too much. “I know you are,” she said gently. “You’re also thinking about Nate.”
Jasmine didn’t confirm or deny it. She picked up her water glass.
“Whatever it is,” Eden said, “it doesn’t have to be decided today.”
“Some of it does,” Jasmine said.
Her phone lit up on the table. She turned it over half out of habit, expecting Dove or Marco, and found an email from theproduction company. She opened it just to give it a quick glance, and there was her schedule for the superhero film laid out in clean columns. Dates and locations and call times running across the next several months like a map of the future suddenly made concrete.
She scrolled through it. The table read was in eight weeks. Two weeks after the wedding. Which was fine, because she and Nate were only going on a “honeymoon” for a few days. Just a quick trip to Napa. One Jasmine planned on being thoroughly intoxicated for the duration of.
After that, when she got back, there would be costume fittings, then training sessions, and a stunt choreographer three times a week starting in week three. The production was thorough and demanding and completely unforgiving in the way that only a major studio film could be, and it was, if everything held, going to be the biggest thing she had ever done.
If everything held.
That was the clause she couldn’t escape. The symptoms had been creeping back over the past week, the ache in her hips that the physical therapist called a flare and that Jasmine called a threat. The stress was feeding it. She knew that now, understood the relationship between her body and her anxiety in a way she hadn’t before the diagnosis. Planning a fake wedding while managing a chronic illness while preparing to film a major motion picture while pretending to be in love with a man she was accidentally actually falling for was not, it turned out, a low-stress undertaking.
Not one bit.
