Off-Limits

Chapter Three: The Reveal

Jake had been dodging Sunday dinners at the Cole house for three years, mostly out of a vague, unexamined instinct that family dinners were the kind of thing that belonged to other people's lives — the kind of comfortable, rooted normalcy he'd never quite trusted himself around. Mason invited him maybe once a month, usually followed by some variation of my mom keeps asking about you, and Jake usually found a reason not to go.

This time, he didn't have one. Mason had actually appealed to a nobler instinct — "she's making the short ribs, man, don't do this to yourself" — and Jake had caved, mostly because two and a half weeks of half-thinking about a woman named Veronica had left him restless in a way he didn't love and wasn't in the mood to sit with alone on a Sunday.

He almost didn't recognize the house — a comfortable brick colonial in a quiet, tree-lined part of the city Jake rarely had reason to visit — but he recognized Mason's car in the driveway, and he recognized Mason himself, who opened the door before Jake had even finished knocking, wearing the specific, barely-contained grin of a man sitting on a secret he was enormously pleased with.

"You're going to want to brace yourself," Mason said.

"For your mom's cooking? I've heard the stories."

"Sure," Mason said. "For that too."

Jake didn't think much of it — Mason's sense of humor ran toward the theatrical even when nothing was actually funny — and followed him down the hall toward the kitchen, toward the smell of something rich and slow-cooked and the sound of a radio playing low, toward a doorway where a woman turned from the stove at the sound of footsteps, wooden spoon still in hand, dark hair pulled back loosely from her face.

Jake stopped walking.

It took his brain a full three seconds to catch up with what his body had already understood — the sharp cheekbones, the mouth that didn't smile for just anyone, the eyes that, on the balcony two and a half weeks ago, had looked at him like he was a puzzle she hadn't decided was worth solving. Veronica. Standing in Mason's mother's kitchen. Holding a wooden spoon like she'd stood in that exact spot a thousand times before, because she had.

"You," she said, and the word came out flat, somewhere between disbelief and dawning horror, her gaze flicking from Jake to her brother and back again with the speed of someone rapidly reassembling a puzzle she very much did not want solved this way.

"You two know each other?" Mason said, in a tone so innocently pleased with itself that Jake understood, all at once, exactly what kind of trap he'd just walked into.

"Mason." Veronica set the spoon down with more force than necessary. "This is the guy? From the party? This is Jake?"

"This is Jake," Mason confirmed, leaning against the doorframe now, thoroughly enjoying himself in a way that made Jake want to put him through a wall. "My best friend. Who spent an entire lunch two weeks ago describing a girl he met at Priya's thing, who apparently made him forget how to function like a normal human being. Didn't catch a last name, though. Real shame."

"You knew," Veronica said, rounding on him.

"I had a suspicion," Mason said, grinning wider. "Confirmed it the second he said your name. Figured I'd let the universe handle the rest."

"The universe," Veronica repeated, incredulous, "is not a valid excuse for letting your best friend hit on your sister without telling either of us."

Sister.

The word landed in Jake's chest like a dropped glass, sharp and final, and every half-formed thought he'd had about her over the last seventeen days — the ones he'd been carefully not examining too closely — rearranged themselves into something considerably more complicated. Veronica Cole. Mason's sister. The girl he'd spent two and a half weeks thinking about, unprompted, in a way he hadn't thought about a woman in longer than he cared to admit, was standing eight feet away from him in her family's kitchen, looking like she wanted to throw the wooden spoon at both of them.

"You're Mason's sister," Jake said, mostly to hear himself confirm it, because his brain seemed to require the sentence spoken aloud before it would fully commit to being true.

"I'm Mason's sister," she agreed, arms crossed now, a flush creeping up her throat that Jake couldn't tell was embarrassment or anger or something more complicated than either. "The one he apparently talks about at length to his — " she gestured vaguely in Jake's direction, searching for a word, " — friends, without mentioning her actual name, evidently, because that would've been useful information roughly two and a half weeks ago."

"In my defense," Mason said, "you never told me his name either. You came home that night and said, and I quote, 'I met a guy at Sam's thing, don't ask.' Forgive me for not connecting the dots on a first name."

"I said don't ask because there was nothing to tell."

"There was clearly something to tell, given the way he was talking about you at lunch."

"Mason."

"I'm just saying, for a guy who didn't even try to kiss you, he sure —"

"Mason."

Jake, for his part, had gone very quiet, doing the math on every piece of the last two and a half weeks with the sinking, specific dread of a man watching a very good thing turn, in real time, into a very complicated one. He knew exactly what he was, or at least what he'd been for the last several years — the guy with a rooftop reputation, the guy with an office pool named after him, the guy Mason himself had once, not unkindly, called a legacy of bad decisions with excellent follow-through. And here was Veronica, watching him with an expression that had gone carefully, deliberately neutral, clearly running the same math and arriving at a considerably less charitable conclusion.

"I didn't know," Jake said quietly, meeting her eyes because it seemed like the only honest thing to do. "For what it's worth. I had no idea."

Something in her expression shifted, fractionally — not warmth, not yet, but a kind of reluctant acknowledgment that he wasn't lying. "I believe you," she said. "That doesn't make this less weird."

"No," he agreed. "It really doesn't."

Mason, still grinning, clapped his hands together with the energy of a man who'd just watched his favorite show hit a season finale. "Well. This is going to be a great dinner."

"Mason, I swear to God —"

"I'm going to go tell Mom you're both staying," he said, already retreating down the hall, laughing to himself in a way that promised this story was going to outlive several future Christmases. "Try not to kill each other before the short ribs are done."

That left Jake and Veronica alone in the kitchen, the radio still playing low, the rich smell of dinner filling the silence neither of them seemed inclined to break first. She studied him for a long moment — the same assessing look from the party, except sharper now, weighted with information she hadn't had two and a half weeks ago.

"So," she said finally. "You're the office legend."

"Depends who's telling it."

"Mason tells it fondly. There's apparently a pool."

Jake winced. "There's not supposed to be a pool."

"There's absolutely a pool," she said, and for just a second, despite everything, the corner of her mouth threatened to give her away again — that same reluctant almost-smile from the balcony, quickly reined back in. "I'm going to need you to understand something, Jake."

"Okay."

"Whatever this was going to be — before you knew, before I knew — it's not going to be that now." Her voice was steady, direct, the voice of someone who'd made a decision and wasn't interested in relitigating it. "I've watched my brother's friends cycle through this office for three years. I know exactly what that looks like from the outside. I'm not interested in being the next name in a pool."

"That's fair," Jake said, and meant it, even as some stubborn, inconvenient part of him was already turning her words over, filing away the fact that she'd said whatever this was going to be like there'd genuinely been something worth naming.

"Good," she said. "Then we're clear."

"Crystal."

She turned back to the stove, picking the spoon back up, and Jake told himself, standing there in a stranger's kitchen with his best friend's sister three feet away and every instinct he'd built over the last several years telling him exactly how to handle a woman who'd just drawn a hard line — that this, at least, would be simple.

He was wrong about that too. He just didn't know it yet.

• • •

Chapter Four: A shared project throws Jake and Veronica together at the office, and the line she drew in her mother's kitchen starts getting harder to hold.