Off Limits

Chapter 14: Performing Normal

They returned to the party separately, five minutes apart at Damian's careful insistence, and Elena spent the walk back across the lawn trying to arrange her face into something that wouldn't immediately announce to every guest present exactly what had just happened in the garden.

It didn't entirely work.

"There you are!" Sophie caught her almost immediately, champagne in hand, her expression bright and slightly too curious for Elena's frayed nerves. "I was looking for you. Where'd you disappear to?"

"Just needed some air," Elena said, grateful her voice came out steadier than she felt. "It's a lot of new faces at once."

"Totally fair. My aunt Carol can be a lot even for people who've known her twenty years." Sophie linked their arms together, steering Elena back toward the main cluster of guests, entirely unsuspecting. "You look flushed, though. You're not getting sick, are you? Please don't get sick before the wedding, I need you at full capacity for dress shopping."

"I'm fine," Elena said, and forced a laugh that felt, to her own ears, only about eighty percent convincing. "Just warm. It's a lot of champagne and a lot of Connecticut humidity."

Sophie accepted the explanation without further scrutiny, already pivoting toward an update about the cake-cutting logistics, and Elena felt the particular, sick relief of a lie successfully told, tangled immediately with the specific guilt of how easily it had come out.

Damian reappeared a few minutes later, considerably more composed than Elena had managed, though she caught the slight tightness still lingering around his eyes as he rejoined the conversation with Sophie's father, playing the role of doting uncle with a practiced ease that made her wonder, uncomfortably, how many other things in his life he'd learned to perform this convincingly.

They didn't speak again directly for the rest of the evening, though Elena felt his attention on her constantly, a low, charged current running beneath every other conversation she attempted, and found herself, more than once, catching his eyes across the lawn in moments neither of them could fully disguise as accidental.

It was near the party's end, guests beginning to drift toward their cars, that Sophie pulled Elena aside one final time, her expression shifting into something more serious than the evening's easy champagne warmth had shown so far.

"Can I ask you something weird?" Sophie said, glancing around to make sure they were out of earshot from the rest of the family. "You and Damian have been kind of... intense with each other tonight. Like, more than usual. Is everything okay between you two? Did something happen?"

Elena's heart slammed hard against her ribs, and she made herself hold Sophie's gaze despite every instinct screaming at her to look away. "Everything's fine. I think we're both just tired. It's been a long week for both of us."

Sophie studied her for a moment longer, something searching in her expression that made Elena's stomach twist with dread, before finally, mercifully, nodding and letting it go. "Okay. As long as you're okay. I just want my two favorite people getting along, you know? It would break my heart if there was some weird tension I didn't know about."

"There's no weird tension," Elena said, and hated, with a fresh, sharp intensity, exactly how easily the lie kept coming now that she'd started telling it.

She found Damian one final time before she left, a brief, careful goodbye in front of Sophie and her parents that gave away nothing to anyone watching, though his eyes held hers a beat too long, and his hand, shaking hers with perfectly innocent formality, pressed something small and folded into her palm before he released it.

She didn't open it until she was alone in the car Sophie had arranged to take her back to the train station, unfolding the small piece of paper with hands that weren't quite steady.

*I can't stop thinking about the garden. I know we need to talk about what happens next, properly, without an audience. Call me when you're home safe. Please.*

Elena stared at the note for a long moment, the Connecticut countryside sliding dark and unfamiliar past the car window, and felt, with a mixture of terror and undeniable want, that whatever conversation was coming next was going to determine considerably more than either of them had bargained for when this had started as a simple career-mentorship dinner three weeks ago.