When Grace Monroe, a professional games journalist and nerdy convention attendee, meets Dylan Rafe Jones at EverCon, she’s expecting a typical hot con fling: anonymous, quick, and with a well-defined endpoint. Further, she makes a point of never hooking up with game devs, considering it an unnecessary and murky ethical line she’d be better off not crossing.

And then she meets Dylan Rafe Jones — a three-name guy; earnest, funny, Golden Retriever-adjacent. She gives him the fake name, the fake identity, and even tries to fake it in the bedroom, but finds that she just can’t lean into the lie this time. Instead, they end up taking a hot (but not sexual!) bath together, and that would probably have been that, if he hadn’t ended up being Dylan Rafe Jones, Game Director of Not Another Zombie Game, the most popular game on the planet, and part of the studio she was currently investigating for allegations of sexism.

Dylan, on his end, is smitten. Very smitten. Superbly smitten. But, as his friend Dredge reminds him, this is not an uncommon occurrence. In fact, it’s part of a very long line of smittenness, a symptom of the limerence he struggles with. He thinks he’s found a lost half in Grace, but he can’t be sure, since she keeps most of her personal life hidden and continues publishing articles that verge on the unethical.

When a giant scoop about Dylan’s studio lands in her lap, Grace must decide how far she’s willing to go for a story, and who she’s willing to hurt along the way. And, in addition to figuring out if he’s actually falling for the girl, Dylan has to admit to his own role within the studio that is about to have a giant fall from grace, pardon the pun.

This is a story about two people who fall in love, but unfortunately continue to have other problems. It is not a romance. Smart, witty, nerdy, Close Enough But Not Too Far is a quirky look into the video game industry, the people who inhabit it, and how love complicates everything.