Page 99 of Here One Moment

“You don’t owe him an explanation,” says Ethan. “You weren’t married.”

“Right, and also I don’t really have an explanation,” says Jasmine again. “I’m finding it a bit stressful. It feels like he’s got the potential to become a bit stalkerish. God, I hate the stalkers.” She sips her margarita and says, “So, what are your views on fish?”

Ethan tries to keep up. “Like your dad’s fish? Frozen fish? For…dinner?”

“No! Yuck! Disgusting. I’d never eat my dad’s fish, sorry not sorry, Dad. No, I’m talking about aquarium therapy.”

“Going to an aquarium?” He could take her to an aquarium. He likes aquariums. Not as a date, of course.

She runs her finger around the rim of her margarita glass and sucks off the salt. “No, I’m talking about getting a fish tank in the apartment. Apparently looking at tropical fish for just a few seconds lowers your heart rate.” She shows him her phone. “Look at this guy! Isn’t he adorable? It’s a guppy. Apparently they live-birth their young! We could wake up one day and find all these tiny guppy babies have been born in the night!”

Ethan is looking at the guppy fish, imagining him and Jasmine as new parents of tiny guppy fish (Well, it’s something. Harvey laughs so hard), when her phone begins to peal the chimes of Big Ben (her choice of ring tone this week) and Carter’s face appears on the screen.

Ethan recoils. “Oh,” he says. “It’s—”

She sighs. “See? Sixth call of the day.”

“Don’t answer,” says Ethan.

“He loses his mind if I don’t.” She answers, avoiding Ethan’s eyes. “Hey, Carter.”

She listens and says, “It’s okay. I know. Don’t be sorry.”

She twists her knuckle near her eye and sticks out her bottom lip to indicate Carter is crying. Ethan can feel Carter’s pain: the shock and disbelief when you’re in love and you think the other person feels exactly the same way.

Terrible. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bloke. He sips his margarita to prevent the Schadenfreude from spreading across his face.

“Why aren’t you at poker with your friends?” Jasmine asks. She murmurs and clucks, like a mother talking to a toddler, and then she becomes careful and conciliatory like a hostage negotiator talking to the man with the gun. Ethan searches his memory. Has any woman had to do this for him following a breakup? Surely not.

Then she says, “I’m at home. I told you. I have not met someone else. I’m just at home.”

Pause.

“Yes, he’s here, he lives here, you know that.” She looks at Ethan. “Well, yes, we are having dinner together because it’s his birthday, but as I told you a million times there is nothing going on between us, and, Carter, it is perfectly normal for a man and a woman to live together and just be friends and nothing else.”

Nothing else.

Pause.

“Yeah, okay, well, you can think that if you want to think that, but it’s not true. I’ve got to go. No. That’s not why! I’m hanging up, Carter.”

She puts the phone face down on the table and dips a cracker into the black bean dip. “Carter says happy fucking birthday.”

Ethan nods his thanks. “Sounds like he’s really applying the ancient philosophy of Stoicism.”

Jasmine splutters on her cracker, and then they are both laughing and it’s maybe the best moment of Ethan’s whole life, but that’s when the apartment buzzer starts going off, over and over, over and over, like an alarm warning of something cataclysmic.

He doesn’t need to say, Is that Carter? The fear on her face is his answer.

Here we go, thinks Ethan, and it feels just like after he kicked that soccer ball and watched it arc across the sky, heading inevitably, unavoidably, toward that Year 11 kid’s big boofhead, and there was literally nothing he could do to change his terrible future.

Ethan has never enjoyed movie prequels because the ending is predetermined. All the way through the movie you know the villain is going to end up the villain. Sure, you might know his backstory now, you might feel a bit sorry for him now, but no plot twist can change his ending.

If Jasmine is in actual danger from her ex-boyfriend, tonight or at some other time, Ethan will have to put her life first. That’s what Jason Bourne would do. That’s what Ethan Chang will do.

Of course he will.

He hopes he will, because right now that buzzer sounds like a chainsaw, and he’s honestly not feeling especially brave.

---