Off Limits

Chapter 7: A Joke That Isn't

Sophie called the next morning while Elena was still getting ready for work, breathless and delighted in the specific way she got when she thought she'd solved a problem for someone she loved.

"Okay, so, Damian mentioned you guys had dinner again last night," Sophie said, without preamble, and Elena felt her stomach drop somewhere near her shoes, an entirely disproportionate reaction to what was, ostensibly, a perfectly innocent piece of information. "I'm so glad you two are getting along. I was a little worried, honestly — he can be kind of intense with new people, and you're kind of intense too, so I wasn't sure if that would click or clash."

"It's been really helpful," Elena said, aiming for casual and hearing, even to her own ears, exactly how careful the words came out. "He's been great about the work stuff. Introductions, advice, all of it."

"Right, the work stuff." Something in Sophie's tone shifted, light and teasing, entirely unsuspecting but landing, for Elena, considerably too close to the specific, charged memory of a hand brushing hers over a bread basket. "Two dinners in five days is a lot of work stuff, though. Should I be worried my uncle's about to become your work husband or something?"

Elena forced a laugh, hoping it sounded more natural than it felt scraping its way out of her throat. "He's just being nice. You know, family-friend nice."

"Oh, for sure, that's very on-brand for him actually. He's always been weirdly generous with people I love, even when he's a total hermit with everyone else." Sophie's voice carried nothing but easy, unbothered warmth, no suspicion at all, and Elena told herself, gripping her phone a little too tightly, that she was simply projecting her own guilty conscience onto an entirely innocent conversation. "Honestly, it's kind of nice seeing him excited about something. He mentioned the restaurant you guys went to last night — that little pasta place in the Village? That's, like, his place, Elena. He never takes anyone there. I don't think I've even been."

Elena's stomach did something complicated and unwelcome at the specific detail, the quiet significance of it landing before she could talk herself out of registering it. "Maybe he just really likes the pasta."

"Maybe." Sophie's tone stayed light, but something in the pause that followed felt, to Elena's suddenly hyperaware ears, a half-beat longer than a genuinely unsuspecting pause should have been. "You'd tell me if something weird was going on, right? Like, obviously nothing weird is going on, I'm being ridiculous, he's my uncle and you're my best friend and that would be insane. I'm just teasing. But you'd tell me. Right?"

The question hung there, light and joking on the surface, and Elena felt the full, sudden weight of exactly how thin the ice under this entire situation actually was — one careless comment from Damian about a restaurant he never took anyone to, one slightly-too-careful pause from Elena, and Sophie's easy, unsuspecting teasing could tip, without warning, into something considerably more dangerous.

"Of course I'd tell you," Elena said, and hated, even as the words left her mouth, how much they cost her to say — not quite a lie, not yet, but close enough to one that her chest ached with the specific discomfort of lying to the one person in this city she trusted completely. "Sophie, he's your uncle. That would be insane, like you said."

"Right. Insane." Sophie laughed, easy and genuine, the moment of suspicion — if it had even been suspicion at all, rather than Elena's own guilty imagination — dissolving as quickly as it had arrived. "Okay, I have to run, I've got a donor call in five minutes. But we're doing brunch this weekend, right? I need real details about the trading floor drama, not the sanitized version you've been giving my mom."

"Brunch, yes. I'll tell you everything," Elena said, and hung up a moment later feeling considerably more shaken than a two-minute phone call about brunch plans should reasonably have left her.

She stood in her half-unpacked apartment, staring at her phone, and made herself admit, finally, in the privacy of her own head, exactly what she'd been carefully avoiding admitting since a hand brushed hers over a bread basket the night before: this was not, whatever careful story she'd been telling herself, simply gratitude for professional kindness.

Her phone buzzed again, and her heart lurched before she'd even looked at the screen, some traitorous, hopeful part of her already certain who it would be.

*Damian Cole: I had a good time last night. I know I said no agenda, and I meant it — but I think we should talk about whatever that was at the subway stairs. Are you free Friday?*

Elena stared at the message for a long moment, her pulse loud in her ears, Sophie's careful, unsuspecting question still echoing uncomfortably in her chest.

She typed back a single word before she could talk herself out of it.

*Yes.*