Off-Limits

Chapter Four: What's Left When You Stop Playing

Nobody saw it coming with Mason and Cassidy — least of all Mason.

What started as one night after the Delacroix rooftop party turned, somehow, into a second night two weeks later, and then a third that neither of them bothered pretending was coincidence. By the time Jake noticed the pattern, Mason had stopped bringing up the office pool entirely, which was, in its own way, the loudest signal of all.

"You're doing the thing," Jake told him one afternoon, watching Mason check his phone for the fourth time in ten minutes with an expression Jake had genuinely never seen on him before — something unguarded, a little stupid, entirely sincere.

"I'm not doing a thing."

"You're doing the thing I used to do. The scanning thing. Except it's just for one person now."

Mason didn't even bother denying it, which told Jake everything. "She's different," he said, simply, like the words surprised him as much as they surprised Jake. "I don't know how else to explain it. I wasn't trying to fall for her. It just — happened."

Six months later, Mason proposed on a Tuesday, in Cassidy's loft, with a ring he'd been carrying around in his jacket pocket for three anxious weeks, and Jake — who'd stood beside Mason through three years of rooftop parties and a hundred forgettable Monday mornings — found himself, for the first time, genuinely happy for someone in a way that had nothing to do with envy and everything to do with recognizing something real when he finally saw it.

He also found himself, in the months that followed, becoming someone he didn't entirely recognize.

• • •

It wasn't dramatic. There was no single moment where Jake decided to stop being the man with a pool named after him. It happened the way most real changes happen — quietly, almost without his permission, in the small decisions that added up to something before he'd noticed the shape of it.

He stopped scanning rooms at parties. He noticed himself doing it — the old reflex, the assessment, the opening line already half-formed — and then noticed himself losing interest in following through, every single time, for reasons he told himself he didn't need to examine too closely. Sasha asked him out for drinks again in the spring; he said he was busy. He wasn't busy. He just found, when he pictured the evening in his head, that it didn't interest him anymore, and pretending otherwise felt like more effort than it was worth.

There was one night, in early summer, when he almost broke the pattern entirely.

Her name was Rachel, from the client services team, blonde and funny and entirely uninterested in playing hard to get, which had always, historically, been exactly Jake's type of easy. They'd ended up at his place after a launch party, her hand already working the buttons of his shirt in the elevator, her mouth warm and insistent against his, and every mechanical instinct in him knew exactly how the rest of the night was supposed to go.

He got as far as the bedroom. He got as far as her back against his mattress, his hand sliding up her thigh out of pure muscle memory, her breath already coming faster beneath him — and then he stopped, mid-motion, staring down at a woman who was, by any reasonable measure, exactly what he used to want, and felt nothing but a kind of hollow, disorienting absence where the old hunger used to be.

"I'm sorry," he said, pulling back, sitting up on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands. "I can't — this isn't — I'm sorry. This isn't fair to you."

Rachel, to her credit, took it better than he deserved — sat up, straightened her dress, gave him a long, assessing look that reminded him uncomfortably of someone else entirely. "There's somebody else," she said. Not a question.

"There's nobody," Jake said, which was technically true and felt like the worst kind of lie anyway. "It's complicated."

"Sounds like there's somebody," Rachel said, gathering her shoes, unbothered, already halfway to being fine about it in the way of someone who'd clearly had this exact conversation before. "Figure it out, Jake. You look miserable."

He didn't sleep much that night. He lay in the dark turning the word complicated over in his head and knowing, with the specific, unwelcome clarity of 3 a.m. honesty, exactly whose face kept showing up whenever he tried to picture wanting anyone else.

He hadn't seen Veronica in four months. Mason mentioned her occasionally — a promotion, a trip, once a boyfriend who apparently hadn't lasted — and every time her name came up, Jake felt something twist in his chest that he had absolutely no right to feel, given the very clear, very reasonable line she'd drawn for him in her mother's kitchen almost a year ago now.

He'd meant to respect it. He still meant to. It just turned out that respecting a line and getting over a person were two entirely different projects, and he was failing spectacularly at the second one.

• • •

The wedding was held on a bright October afternoon at a vineyard forty minutes outside the city, the kind of golden-hour, string-lights-in-the-trees affair that Cassidy had planned down to the last detail and Mason had cheerfully agreed to every part of, still wearing that same stupid, unguarded happiness Jake had first noticed a year ago.

Jake stood up as best man and gave a toast that made half the room laugh and Cassidy's mother cry, and if he was honest with himself, some part of the speech — the part about finally getting it right, finally knowing when to stop looking — was as much about himself as it was about Mason, though nobody in the room besides Jake seemed to notice.

He saw Veronica across the reception before he consciously registered looking for her.

She was in dark green, her hair loose the way it had been that first night at the party, laughing at something one of the bridesmaids had said, and the sight of her hit him with the same force it had a year ago on that fifth-floor balcony — except sharper now, weighted with everything he'd spent the last four months failing to talk himself out of feeling.

She caught him looking. This time, she didn't glance away first.

He crossed the reception toward her with considerably less confidence than he'd once carried across a hundred rooftops, and found her waiting, a glass of champagne in hand, an expression on her face he couldn't quite read — guarded, but not closed.

"You clean up well for a best man," she said. "Good speech."

"Some of it was even about Mason."

That got a real laugh out of her, quick and surprised, the same one from the kitchen a year ago, and something in Jake's chest loosened for the first time in months.

"You look different," she said, studying him with the same frank, assessing look she'd given him that very first night. "I heard a rumor you've been keeping to yourself lately. Very unlike the legend."

"The legend retired."

"Did he," she said, not quite a question, watching him carefully now, like she was deciding whether to believe it.

"I did," Jake said, and found, standing there in the fading gold light with the band starting up behind them, that he didn't have it in him to be clever about it anymore, didn't want to be clever about it — just wanted to be honest, for once, and let the chips fall wherever they were going to fall. "I haven't been with anyone since I found out you were his sister, Veronica. Not because I was trying to prove something. I tried. More than once. It just — didn't take. There's only been one person I've actually wanted, this whole year, and it's been enormously inconvenient, because I made you a promise about respecting a line, and I've kept it, and I'm about to ask you to let me redraw it anyway."

Veronica was quiet for a long moment, the champagne forgotten in her hand, something working behind her eyes that he couldn't fully read — surprise, maybe, or the specific vertigo of hearing something you'd stopped letting yourself hope for.

"That's a lot of honesty for a wedding reception," she said finally, but her voice had lost its edge.

"I've had a year to think about it."

"You could've called."

"You told me not to."

"I told you not to be the guy with the pool," she said. "I never said don't call."

Jake felt something in his chest crack open, warm and reckless. "Have dinner with me," he said. "Not a party. Not an office thing. Just dinner. Let me actually try, this time, with all the information."

She looked at him for a long moment, the band swelling into something slow behind them, her brother spinning his new wife under the string lights twenty feet away, oblivious to the entire conversation happening at the edge of his reception.

"One dinner," Veronica said finally, and there — there it was, the almost-smile from the balcony, no longer trying quite so hard to hide itself. "Don't make me regret it."

"I won't," Jake said, and for the first time in a year, he actually believed himself.

• • •

Chapter Five: The first date — and the tension that's been building for a year finally starts to break.