Tempted By the Safety (Off-Limits #4)

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Spencer

Strong safety is the last line of defense: you see the whole field, read the play before it develops, and when everybody in front of you blows their assignment, you clean it up.

I’ve played eight seasons in the league, and somewhere around season three it became a reflex.

“You missed the packaging supplier meeting,” Amanda says.

She’s got her glasses pushed up into her salt-and-pepper pixie cut, which is what she does when she wants me to see her whole face while she takes me apart. As my longtime agent, she knows exactly where all my buttons are and in which order to push them.

“I rescheduled it.”

“You missed the reschedule.”

I cut into the halibut, forty dollars for a piece of fish the size of a coaster. I know Amanda didn’t pick this restaurant for the food. It’s just that a place this expensive runs half empty at lunch, which means no crowds.

“Third double-booking this month.” She doesn’t even check her phone for that one, which means she’s been keeping count in her head. “And I want to talk about your emails.”

“What’s wrong with my emails?”

“Spencer, the co-packer asked you a yes-or-no question about the production timeline. You wrote back, ‘Fine. S.’ They read it as you pulling out of the deal, and I spent Tuesday convincing them you weren’t.”

“I said fine. Fine means yes.”

“To you. To anyone who doesn’t know you, it reads like a threat.”

Across the room, our waiter is refilling water glasses at a table of four.

He’s young, twenty-three or twenty-four, curly brown hair, lean, and he moves through the dining room the way good slot receivers move through zone coverage: never still, never rushed, always ending up exactly where the play needs him.

He tops off the last glass, says something I can’t hear, and the whole table laughs.

“It’s the offseason,” Amanda is saying. “Which would be great if you were actually taking one. But you keep training full time and you’re launching a nutrition company.

You’ve got investor calls, a co-packer, a brand consultant you keep ghosting, and a calendar that’s trying to kill you. You need an assistant.”

“No.”

“Someone to handle the calendar. Keep you out of meetings you don’t need to be in. Run the errands you keep doing yourself at eleven at night because it’s the only slot left.”

“An assistant is one more person to manage. It’s not less work. It’s the same work with a middleman.”

“You know what’s fascinating?” She picks up her wine. “I’ve represented you for nine years and I have never once worried about your work ethic. What I worry about is that you think being tired is an accomplishment.”

I don’t answer that, because I’ve learned that silence ends these conversations faster than talking does.

Talking gives her material. Silence gives her nothing to counter, and Amanda hates having nothing to argue against more than she hates losing.

It’s an effective tactic, and I’m a big believer in running the play that works.

She narrows her eyes at me because she knows exactly what I’m doing, and I look past her shoulder because the waiter is doing something again.

There’s a kid at a table by the window, around six or seven, kicking the table leg while three generations of his family discuss the dessert menu.

The waiter has dropped into a crouch next to the kid’s chair, eye level with him, holding the dessert menu and walking him through it.

I catch fragments of their discussion: tart, pie, something about crust ratios.

The kid stops kicking the table and leans in, invested in whatever the difference between a tart and a pie turns out to be.

The waiter is explaining it like this is the most important question he’ll be asked all week.

“Are you listening to me?” Amanda says.

“Always.”

“You need someone whose job is making sure Spencer Rhodes’ life doesn’t collapse under the weight of Spencer Rhodes. That’s it. That’s the pitch. Calendar, meetings, errands. You keep training, you keep building the company, and somebody competent catches everything you keep dropping.”

“I don’t drop things.”

“You dropped the supplier meeting. And the reschedule. You’re one man, Spence,” she adds gently.

The waiter passes behind her carrying a tray, and I finally catch the name on his tag: Milo.

There’s another waiter two tables over, petite, with four plates stacked up her arm and two more waiting on the table she’s clearing, doing that panicked math when there are more plates than arms. Milo doesn’t say anything to her, just slides in and takes the two extras onto his own tray, on top of everything he’s already carrying.

She exhales, and he’s already gone, no credit, no discussion.

“Spencer.”

“I’ll think about it,” I say.

Amanda sets her wine down with the flat expression of a person who has heard it from me approximately fifty times and watched it mean no on all fifty. “Sure you will.”

Needing a break from this pointless conversation, I tell her I’m going to find the restroom and head for the back of the restaurant.

The hallway to the restrooms runs past the service areas, and about halfway down, the dining room noise drops away. That’s when I hear someone’s voice, pitched in that specific register people use for delivering bad news.

“—want you to know it’s nothing personal. Corporate’s cutting floor staff across all three locations. It’s a numbers thing.”

There’s an alcove tucked off the hallway, and I can’t see past the shelving, but two people are talking in it. The restroom is another twenty feet, but I stop walking. In my defense, reading situations I’m not part of is most of what I get paid for.

“Hey, no, totally. Numbers.” The second voice is Milo, and I can hear the effort it takes him to sound easy. “Numbers are numbers. Just… can I ask one thing? Because I’ve been here two years. Danny started six weeks ago.”

“Danny’s family.”

Small pause. “Right. Sure.”

“And look, it’s not only that. There’s the lateness. You’ve got two documented—”

“Two. In two years.”

“Documented is documented. Corporate looks at the file.”

“I was late because my mom needed—”

He stops, chopping it off himself, and I can hear the swallow from the hallway. And when he comes back, two seconds later, his voice has been ironed flat.

“You know what, it doesn’t matter. You’ve already made up your mind.”

“I have. And it’s effective immediately,” the manager says, and now his voice has relief in it, because the hard part is over and the kid made it easy for him. “You’ll get your last check today, and I’m happy to be a reference. I mean that, Milo. You’re one of the best I’ve had.”

Which is a hell of a thing to say to someone you’re firing instead of Danny.

“Okay. So… you’re down a server for the dinner rush, then.”

“I guess we are, yeah.”

“Let me finish the shift. Close out my tables, help set for dinner.”

The pause this time belongs to the manager, and it’s the pause of a man being handed something he knows he doesn’t deserve. “You don’t have to do that.”

“I know. But I don’t want to leave it all to Emily.”

Someone steps into the hallway behind me, and I make myself walk, because eavesdropping is not a look I want to explain. I push into the restroom, run the water, and stand there with my hands under it, staring at a mirror and thinking about rigged plays.

Because that’s what that was, the outcome decided before the conversation started. And I want to fix it, even though it’s not my field and not my call. There’s nothing to be done.

I hate nothing to be done.

It’s my least favorite sentence in the English language, and it’s currently sitting under my skin like an itch I can’t reach.

I shut off the water and walk back out, finding the alcove now empty.

At the table, Amanda has finished her wine and is scrolling through her phone.

She looks up when I sit. “What happened?”

“Nothing.”

“Uh-huh.” She sets the phone down. “You’ve got your trouble face.”

“I don’t have a trouble face.”

“You have an entire wardrobe of faces and I have a catalog. That one’s trouble.”

I ignore her, picking my fork back up and addressing the halibut, which has gone cold. After a moment she shrugs and lets it go, and I keep eating the cold fish.

Six minutes later, our waiter is back on the floor with his apron retied and a dessert tray riding his shoulder. His face carries no sign of what just happened.

He hits the big table by the window and says something that makes the grandfather laugh, and then he presents the kid’s tart, lowering it in front of him the way you’d hand over a trophy.

The kid’s whole face changes. Milo says something else, taps the edge of the plate like he’s sharing a secret, and then he’s spinning away with the tray balanced up on his fingertips, weaving between tables, scanning for the next thing.

What I can’t stop watching isn’t even his smile. It’s how fast it came back. I’ve taken hits that put me on the ground with the stadium spinning, and I know exactly what it takes to get up. There’s always a beat, a breath on the turf. Even the toughest guys I’ve played with take the beat.

Milo didn’t take it. He walked out of that alcove and back onto the floor, and the smile was already installed, no seams. Nobody comes back up that fast, which means that’s a route he’s run a thousand times: hit, up, smile, go, drilled so deep it doesn’t need his permission anymore.

I’m doing math on how many hits it takes before popping up smiling becomes muscle memory, and not liking the answer.

“Okay, why are you staring at the waiter?” Amanda asks.

“He just got fired.”

“He what?”

“I overheard it in the hallway. They’re cutting floor staff and they cut him, and he asked to finish the dinner rush anyway.” I nod toward the window. “That’s a guy working a shift he’s not getting paid for.”

Amanda turns, not subtle about it, and watches him.

“Huh,” she says finally. “Well, we can leave him a bigger tip.”

The itch under my skin, the one that started in the bathroom, becomes unbearable.

“I’m going to hire him,” I say.