Off-Limits

Chapter Six: Telling Him Myself

They'd been dating six weeks before Jake decided he wasn't going to let Mason find out the way things usually got found out at Vantage — a slipped comment at lunch, a photo someone's cousin posted, the office grapevine doing what the office grapevine always did. Veronica had left it up to him how and when, understanding, without either of them needing to say it outright, that this particular conversation was Jake's to have.

He picked a Tuesday, no particular reason, just a night when Mason wasn't running on wedding-planning adrenaline or newlywed exhaustion, and showed up at his and Cassidy's place with a six-pack he barely touched.

"You're doing the thing," Mason said, handing him a beer anyway, studying Jake's face with the particular attentiveness of three years of friendship. "The nervous thing. You haven't done the nervous thing since your strategy review with the Hendricks account."

"I need to tell you something, and I need you to actually let me finish before you react."

Mason's easy grin faded into something more careful. "Okay."

"I've been seeing Veronica. Since the wedding. It's been six weeks." Jake said it plainly, no cushioning, because he'd decided somewhere on the drive over that Mason deserved the whole thing straight, not softened. "I should've told you sooner. I didn't, because I wanted to be sure it was real before I put you in the middle of it, and I know that's not really an excuse, it's just the truth."

The silence that followed went on long enough that Jake genuinely didn't know which direction it was going to break.

"Six weeks," Mason said finally.

"Six weeks."

"My sister. Six weeks. And nobody thought that was information I needed."

"I'm telling you now."

"You're telling me now because you got caught guilty enough to preempt it, which, respectfully, is not the same as telling me." Mason set his beer down, and for the first time in three years of friendship, Jake watched something genuinely hard settle into his best friend's expression — not anger exactly, something closer to a very specific, very personal kind of protectiveness. "You know what you were, Jake. I loved you anyway, because you're my best friend and that's just what you were. But that's my sister. You understand why I'm having a reaction to this."

"I understand completely."

"Do you? Because six months ago you were the guy with a pool named after him at the office, and now you're telling me you've been quietly dating my sister for six weeks and somehow that's supposed to just be fine?"

"It's not supposed to just be fine," Jake said. "I'm not asking you to just be fine with it. I'm telling you because I owe you the truth, and because I'm not going anywhere, and I'd rather you be angry at me with all the information than find out some other way and be angry at both of us for hiding it."

Mason studied him for a long moment, arms crossed, the protective older-brother posture Jake had genuinely never seen aimed at him before. "You stopped," he said slowly, like he was working it out loud. "A year ago. I noticed. I didn't say anything because I figured it wasn't my business, but I noticed. That was because of her."

"That was because of her."

"The whole year. Before the wedding, even."

"The whole year."

Something in Mason's shoulders eased, fractionally, though his voice stayed serious. "If you hurt her," he said, "I don't care how long we've been friends. I will end you, and I will feel great about it, and Cassidy will help me hide the body."

"I know."

"I mean it, Jake."

"I know you mean it. I'd expect nothing less." Jake held his gaze, steady. "I'm not going to hurt her. I know that doesn't mean anything yet, coming from me, given the history. I'm just asking you to let me prove it instead of tell you."

Mason exhaled, long and slow, and something like the old grin flickered back at the corners of his mouth, reluctant but real. "She's happier than I've seen her in years," he admitted. "I noticed that too. Tried not to think too hard about why."

"Yeah?"

"Don't let it go to your head." But he picked his beer back up, and clinked it against Jake's, and the tension in the room broke into something that still had teeth in it but had stopped being a fight. "You've got a lot of ground to make up. Both of you. This whole 'let's not tell Mason' plan was genuinely insulting, by the way."

"Noted."

"I'm serious. I want details. Not — " Mason held up a hand, grimacing, "— not those details, God, never those details, I will actually throw up. But the rest of it. I want to know my sister's happy for real reasons, not just performed at family dinners."

"I can do that," Jake said, and meant it, and felt something in his chest that had been braced for a fight finally start to loosen.

• • •

He told Veronica about it that night, sitting on her couch with her legs draped over his lap, and she listened with the particular focus she brought to everything, nodding along, occasionally wincing at the parts that clearly matched her own imagined version of how it would go.

"He threatened to end you."

"And have Cassidy hide the body. Very specific plan. I respect the preparation."

"That's actually sweet, in a deeply unhinged way." She shifted closer, tucking herself against his side, and Jake wrapped an arm around her, feeling the particular, quiet satisfaction of a hard thing finally handled. "Thank you for telling him yourself."

"I wasn't going to let you carry that."

"I know," she said, tilting her face up toward his. "That's kind of the point. You keep doing things like that, and I'm going to start believing the legend really did retire."

"He did," Jake said, and kissed her, slow and unhurried, the particular ease of six weeks of knowing exactly how she liked to be kissed settling into something deeper the longer it went on. She made a soft sound against his mouth, her hand sliding up into his hair, and when she shifted to straddle him on the couch, there was nothing tentative in it at all — six weeks of careful restraint finally giving way to something neither of them seemed interested in holding back any longer.

"Stay tonight," she murmured against his jaw, her fingers working the buttons of his shirt with unhurried deliberateness. "Actually stay. Not the couch."

"Veronica —"

"I've thought about this for a year, Jake." She pulled back just far enough to look at him, dark eyes steady, no trace of hesitation in them. "I'm not interested in waiting anymore. Are you?"

"No," he said, and the word came out rougher than he meant it to. "God, no."

She led him to the bedroom by the hand, and there was nothing rushed about the way he undressed her once they got there — no urgency for its own sake the way there'd been with a hundred other women whose names he barely remembered now, but something slower and far more deliberate, learning her the way you learn something you intend to keep. He unzipped her dress and let it fall, pressing his mouth to her shoulder, her collarbone, the curve of her throat, and when she stood in front of him in nothing but ivory lace, dark hair loose around her shoulders, he took a long moment just to look at her — the sharp cheekbones, the mouth that had once told him no and meant it, the body he'd spent a full year imagining and had never once let himself picture in this kind of detail, full breasts straining against delicate lace, hips he wanted his hands on for the rest of the night.

"You're staring," she said, echoing, unknowingly, the exact words Cassidy had said to Mason a month before.

"I've earned it," Jake said. "A year of earning it."

He kissed her again, walking her back toward the bed, and when he laid her down and got the bra undone, taking her breast into his mouth, tongue circling her n****e until she arched and gasped his name, there was a kind of reverence in it that surprised even him — not less hungry than it used to be, but hungrier in a way that had somewhere real to land. He worked his way down her body slowly, deliberately, learning every gasp and every place that made her go still and quiet, and when he finally peeled the last of the lace away and settled between her thighs, she was already trembling, already soaked, a year of wanting finally catching up with both of them at once.

He took his time anyway. He built it the way he'd learned to build things that were worth having — patient, deliberate, the flat of his tongue and then his fingers, curling deep, finding exactly the spot that made her cry out and fist the sheets, backing off twice just to feel her whole body strain toward him before he finally let her have it, sealing his mouth over her and working her through an orgasm that left her shaking, gasping his name into the dark like a confession.

She didn't give him long to recover his bearings before she pulled him back up her body, flipping him onto his back with a strength that surprised him, and worked his belt open with unsteady, determined hands. "My turn," she murmured, echoing again, and took him into her mouth with none of the hesitation he might have expected, hot and slow and devastatingly thorough, watching his face the entire time with a kind of possessive satisfaction that undid him nearly as much as her mouth did. She built him right to the edge, exactly the way he'd done to her, and pulled back at the last possible second, lips glistening, utterly pleased with herself.

"Condom," he managed, and she was already reaching into the nightstand drawer before he'd finished the word.

When he finally pushed into her, slow, giving her body time to adjust to him, her back arched clean off the mattress and a sound tore out of her that was half his name, half something wordless — a year of waiting collapsing into a single, overwhelming moment neither of them had any interest in rushing through. They found their rhythm together, unhurried at first, her legs wrapped around his waist, her hands mapping every inch of his back, and then faster as the last of their restraint gave out entirely, her nails dragging red lines down his shoulders, his name breaking apart in her mouth over and over as he drove into her deep and steady. She came again with a cry she didn't bother to muffle, clenching tight around him, and he followed only moments later, groaning her name into her throat, both of them collapsing together into the tangled sheets, breathless, wrecked, and entirely, finally unguarded with each other.

"Worth the wait?" she asked, much later, her head on his chest, his fingers tracing lazy patterns down her spine.

"Every single day of it," Jake said, and meant it more than he'd ever meant anything in his life.

• • •

Chapter Seven: Six months later — the life they've built, the family that's fully accepted it, and the question of what comes next.