Pearl touched her fan to her mouth, allowing each fold to pass over her lips. “Well, there’s no helping it then.”

Jasmine scrunched her fingers into her dress and leveled her gaze forward. “I wish there was something I could do.”

The fan snapped shut and touched Pearl’s throat, her smile indulging. “I don’t. This is how you’re meant to be.”

Jasmine felt her cheeks burning and worried the fabric in her hands, “I wish you had warned me about how love is. You gave me so many books with knights, princesses and pleasant endings. Each of them contained a little piece of a dream I wanted.”

Pearl arched her brows and eased back into her chair, folding one long length of her leg over the other. “My dear, there’s nothing I could have taught you about love outside of fiction and fairy tales. You talk to me like I should have warned you, prepared you, or given you instructions on how to experience it.”

“You should have! Maybe then, I wouldn’t have-” she holds a gloved hand just under her mouth, preparing to cover it at any moment. “If I had known I would have run away.”

Pearl closed her eyes.

Jasmine felt a sob building in her throat and swallowed it with a painful grimace. “Now I’m consumed. All I think about is the moment I see him again. I cannot even pin my hair without thinking of how he …”

“Unpinned it.” Pearl finishes.

Jasmine put both hands over her face, her fingers tight together as she covered her eyes, feeling her own breath rolling back against her cheeks. “Please don’t say such vulgar things.”

The chair creaked as Pearl took leave of it, kneeling in front of Jasmine. She began to smooth the wrinkles from the gauzy fabric. “You won’t think of it that way, in time. You’ll learn to appreciate those feelings, regardless of how they seem to have your heart in rough seas.”

Tears ran down Jasmine’s face until they stopped and soaked into her covered palms. “I don’t know what to do next.”

Pearl laid her head against the girl’s trembling knees, “That’s how you know it’s right.”