Page 1 of Off Limits

1

ASA

When I was a kid,I used to wish I had a time machine. Not because I wanted to relive events from my life, but so I could skip past days I’d rather not experience.

Tomorrow was one of those days, and I’d spent the last three weeks trying to come up with an excuse that would allow me to skip my little sister’s birthday party without hurting her feelings or pissing off my mom and stepdad.

“What’s that face for?” Isaac, one of my coworkers and the closest thing I had to a best friend, asked as he came to stand with me at my workstation.

“What face?” I slid my gaze to his.

We were in the middle of a rare daytime lull at Legacy Mechanics, the garage we worked at. I usually welcomed these breaks, but not having anything to do gave me time to think, and that was the last thing I wanted right now.

“That face.” He pointed at my cheek and narrowed his eyes suspiciously.

“Nothing’s up,” I lied. “This is just my face.”

I trusted Isaac more than anyone in the world, and he might be the closest thing I had to a best friend, but just like everyone else in my life, he meant more to me than I meant to him.

Isaac and his best friend Jamie had been attached at the hip since Isaac and I started working at the garage three years ago, and they’d recently come out as boyfriends. They were perfect for each other, even if it took them an ungodly amount of time to figure out that they were in love with each other and not just BFFs.

Usually my status as a close friend and not a best friend didn’t bother me, but with everything going on in my life right now, it was just one more reminder that I really didn’t have anyone who was just mine.

“That’s not your face,” Jesse, our other daytime coworker and another of my closest friends, said as he came to stand with us. “That’s the face you make when you’re pretending to be fine but you’re in internal panic mode.”

“I’m not panicking,” I said, more to be contrary than to rebuke Jesse’s statement. I wasn’t panicking, not really. I was justina panic.

“You can try to use semantics all you want, but we know you.” Jesse’s gaze was scrutinizing. “You’ve been off for weeks. I know you don’t like talking about things, but you’re walking around with a storm cloud over your head, and it’s starting to freak me out.”

I paused at that. Jesse was a lot like me in the sense that he kept things bottled up and didn’t like to talk about his personal life, or at least he used to be before he got together with his boyfriend, Sebastian.

It was great to see him open up and shed the mask of indifference he used to wear to protect himself, but it also meant he was more willing to push me when I tried to shut him out, which I wasn’t sure I was a fan of yet.

“It’s nothing,” I said, my voice hollow to my own ears.

“Liar.” Isaac gently bumped me with his hip.

Isaac was only a few inches taller than my own five eleven frame, but he had about forty pounds of muscle on me and was one of the most physically fit people I knew thanks to his years of playing hockey and his obsessive workout habits. I appreciated his light touch so I didn’t get yeeted across the room.

“It’s really nothing,” I insisted.

The look Jesse gave me made it clear he wasn’t going to drop it this time.

Isaac tapped his hip against mine again. “I know you don’t like when we push you, but Jesse’s not the only one who’s worried. You’ve been different lately, and I don’t like seeing you like this.”

I bit back the urge to tell them I was fine. I wasn’t, and Isaac and Jesse were my friends. It wasn’t like I had a ton of those, and it would be stupid to push the few people who cared about me away.

“I’m just not looking forward to tomorrow,” I hedged.

“What’s tomorrow?” Jesse asked.

“My baby sister’s birthday.”

Jesse and Isaac exchanged a confused look.

“Ruby?” Isaac asked, naming my youngest sibling.

I nodded.

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