Off-Limits

Chapter Twelve: The Part Where She Runs

Three months in, and Sasha still hadn't told Marcus about her father.

It wasn't a secret exactly — Veronica knew the broad strokes, Jake had heard a version of it years ago during one of their old post-conquest diner breakfasts, back when Sasha had still been just a name on his rotation instead of someone he genuinely cared about. But Marcus didn't know, because Sasha had gotten very good, over a long time, at making sure the men she dated never got far enough in to need to know.

Her father had been charming. That was the part that made it complicated — not a villain, not someone she could point to and say there, that's why I don't trust this. Just a man who'd been warm and present and endlessly promising for the first twelve years of her life, and then, the year she turned thirteen, had simply stopped being any of those things — not through some dramatic rupture, just a slow fade into unreliability, broken plans, a second family two states away that nobody had known about until it was too late to un-know it. She'd learned, young, that charm was a tool people used right up until the moment they didn't need to use it on you anymore.

She'd built an entire adult life around that lesson. Get out before anyone gets the chance to fade on you first. It had worked, more or less, for a decade — a string of men who were fun for exactly as long as she wanted them to be and never long enough to matter.

Marcus was the first one who'd made that strategy feel difficult.

• • •

The trouble started, as these things usually did, with something small. Marcus had a work trip — three days, a conference in another city, nothing unusual — and he'd texted her the second night, later than he normally did, with a message that read conference dinner running long, sorry, talk tomorrow and nothing else.

Sasha stared at the message for a long time.

She knew, rationally, exactly what it was. A busy work dinner. The kind of thing that happened constantly, that meant nothing, that any reasonable person would read exactly as written and go to sleep unbothered. But some old, well-worn groove in her brain — thirteen years old again, waiting by a phone that wasn't going to ring — took the three words talk tomorrow and turned them into evidence of something else entirely, and by the time Marcus actually called the next morning, cheerful and apologetic about the dead conference wifi, Sasha had already spent half the night constructing an elaborate, airtight case for why she should end things before he could.

"You've been weird for two days," Marcus said, the night he got back, sitting across from her at the restaurant where they'd had their fourth date, watching her push food around her plate without eating much of it. "Did something happen while I was gone?"

"I'm fine."

"You're not fine. You've barely looked at me since I walked in."

"I said I'm fine, Marcus." The words came out sharper than she meant them to, and she watched him absorb the sharpness without flinching, which somehow made it worse — made the whole thing feel less like an argument and more like a test he was calmly, infuriatingly passing while she failed it in real time.

"Okay." He set down his fork, giving her his full attention in the way she'd noticed he always did, the thing that had first made her think he might actually be different. "Then help me understand what's going on, because two days ago things were good, and now you're looking at me like I did something."

"Maybe you did."

"What did I do?"

"You went quiet for a night. On a work trip. That's it. That's the whole crime." Sasha heard herself saying it, heard how small it sounded out loud, and hated that hearing it didn't make the feeling underneath it go away. "I know it's stupid."

"I didn't say it was stupid."

"You're thinking it."

"I'm thinking," Marcus said, carefully, "that something bigger than a late text is happening right now, and I'd rather you just tell me what it actually is instead of us fighting about wifi at a conference hotel."

And that, more than the actual fight, was the thing that cracked her open — because he was right, and because nobody had ever bothered to ask the follow-up question before, had just accepted the deflection and moved on, letting her keep the real thing buried where it couldn't cost her anything.

"My dad left," she said, finally, the words coming out flatter than she meant them to, defensive even now. "When I was thirteen. Not all at once — he just got quieter and quieter and further away until one day he wasn't really there anymore, even before he officially wasn't there anymore. And I promised myself a long time ago I wasn't going to be the person waiting by a phone for someone who'd already decided to stop showing up. So when you went quiet for one night, some very old, very stupid part of my brain decided that was the beginning of the same thing happening again, and I've spent two days trying to get ahead of it by pushing you away first."

Marcus was quiet for a long moment, and Sasha braced herself — for pity, for platitudes, for the specific kind of gentle handling that would make her feel even more exposed than she already did.

"Thank you for telling me that," he said instead, simply. "That must have been hard to say out loud."

"It was easier than I expected. Which is its own problem, honestly. I don't like how easy that was."

"Why is that a problem?"

"Because it means I let you in far enough to say it," Sasha admitted. "And letting people in far enough to say things like that is exactly how they end up mattering enough to actually hurt you."

• • •

He reached across the table and took her hand, not saying anything clever, not trying to fix thirteen years of carefully constructed self-protection with a single perfect sentence, just holding on.

"I'm not going to pretend I can promise you I'll never disappoint you," he said eventually. "Nobody can promise that honestly. But I can promise you I'm not going anywhere quietly. If something's wrong, you'll hear it from me directly, not find out by me just fading. I owe you that much, especially given how we actually met."

"That's a low bar you're clearing."

"I'm aware. I'd like the chance to clear a higher one too, eventually, if you'll let me."

Sasha studied him for a long moment — the same slow, assessing look she'd given him across the table at that first ambush dinner, except there was nothing guarded left in it now, just something raw and a little frightened and, underneath that, something that felt dangerously close to hope.

"I almost texted you Tuesday night telling you not to bother coming back," she admitted. "Had the whole message typed out. Something about how this was moving too fast and I needed space."

"What stopped you?"

"Veronica, actually. I called her instead of sending it, and she reminded me that running from something good because it might eventually hurt isn't actually protecting myself from anything — it's just guaranteeing the hurt happens on my own schedule instead of letting it maybe not happen at all." She let out a short, unsteady laugh. "Extremely irritating, hearing that from someone whose own husband had to chase her down for a year before she let him in."

"Remind me to thank her."

"Don't. She'll be insufferable about it, same as Jake was about setting us up in the first place." Sasha turned her hand over in his, lacing their fingers together properly. "I'm not good at this part. The letting-someone-actually-in part. I need you to know that up front, because it's probably going to happen again — some small thing is going to spook me and I'm going to want to bolt."

"Then I'll keep showing up anyway," Marcus said. "For as long as it takes you to believe that's actually what I'm going to do."

• • •

They didn't go back to his place that night, or hers — just walked, for a long time, through streets neither of them was in any hurry to leave, talking about nothing important and everything important at once, the kind of conversation that mattered more for the staying than for anything actually said.

It wasn't until two nights later, once the rawness of the conversation had settled into something steadier, that Sasha showed up at his door unannounced, a bottle of wine in hand and a look on her face that told him exactly what kind of night this was going to be.

"I believe you," she said, the second the door was open. "About showing up. I wanted to tell you that properly, not over text."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." She stepped inside, setting the wine down without much interest in actually drinking it, and pulled him down into a kiss that carried three months of careful distance finally, deliberately collapsing. "I also wanted to show you. If that's all right."

"More than all right," Marcus said, and kicked the door shut behind her.

• • •

Chapter Thirteen: The whole group gathers for news that changes everything — starting with Veronica.