Page 23

Margo

Three weeks in, and I’ve learned something about myself I will not be putting on a résumé: I like it when Theo forgets to be careful with me.

It’s a Thursday, early February, the kind of gray afternoon where the light gives up around three. I have exactly one free hour between my last class and a study group I’ve already mentally canceled. I spent it the way I’ve been spending every stolen hour lately — which is to say, here, in his bed, in his room, with the rules technically intact and completely in ruins.

Because right now I’m on my hands and knees in Theo Mercer’s sheets with my face half in his pillow and my fingers fisted in the cotton, and he’s got one hand splayed hot across the small of my back and the other gripping my hip hard enough to leave something, and he’s fucking me like he means it. Rough. Deep. None of the careful he started with three weeks ago, back when he still handled me like I might come apart.

And here’s the thing nobody warns you about being the perfect one your whole life: everyone treats you like glass. Delicate, breakable, best kept on a high shelf where you can’t get chipped. My whole family, and every boy before this one — careful with me, always, like I was a thing to be preserved instead of used.

Theo is not being careful. Theo has his hand in my hair and he’s got no notes about preserving me, and God help me, I’ve never felt less breakable in my life.

“Fuck,” I gasp into the pillow, because that’s the whole vocabulary I’ve got left, and he leans down over my back, chest to my spine, and puts his mouth right at my ear.

“Yeah?” Low. Wrecked. “This what you want?”

“Don’t you dare stop —”

“Wasn’t going to.” His hips snap and I see stars. “You feel that? That’s the version nobody gets. Say it.”

And I would say anything, I would sign my name to anything, I’m three seconds from a confession I’d regret for a year — when the front door bangs open two floors down and the whole house fills with voices.

We both freeze.

Not the good kind of freeze. The other kind.

“—telling you, the ref was blind in both eyes—” Cash, loud, mid-argument, already halfway into the kitchen from the sound of it.

“—he was not, you were offside by a mile—” Wyatt, right behind him.

And under them, low and certain, the one that turns my blood to ice water: Beau. “Y’all want the good pans or the sad pans?”

The guys are home. All three of them. Home, in the kitchen, two floors down and one flight of stairs from the bed I’m currently naked in. Sloane’s the only person who could’ve warned me, and Sloane’s in a lecture and then a shift at the bookstore. So nobody knew. We did not plan for this. I have made a catastrophic error in a house full of hockey players, and I am on my hands and knees with Theo still buried inside me.

I go rigid. I start to pull forward, off him, panic taking the wheel —

And he holds me there. One hand at my hip, firm, and his mouth back at my ear, and I feel him grin against my skin, the absolute menace.

“Don’t move,” he breathes, so quiet it’s more air than sound. “They can’t hear us if you’re quiet. Can you be quiet for me, Margo?”

And I should say no. I should say this is insane, they’re right there, get off me. What I actually do — what my traitor body actually does — is push back onto him. Because apparently the part of me that spent twenty years terrified of getting caught has been quietly replaced by a stranger who finds this the single hottest thing that has ever happened to her.

“That’s my girl,” he murmurs, and starts to move again. Slow now. Silent. Deep and unhurried and devastating, both of us barely breathing, the guys’ voices rising and falling downstairs like weather, and I have to shove my own face into his pillow to muffle the sound that comes out of me when he reaches around and gets his fingers exactly where I need them.

I come apart with a scream I bury completely in the cotton, my whole body locking, shaking, silent as I’ve ever been and louder inside than a stadium — and I feel him lose it right behind me, feel his rhythm break, and instead of a groan that would carry through the floorboards and end both our lives, Theo drops down over my back and sinks his teeth into my bare shoulder, hard, muffling himself against my skin as he comes.

The bite should hurt. It mostly just finishes what the rest of him started.

For a second we stay exactly like that, folded over, both of us wrecked and shaking and dead silent, his mouth still pressed to the mark he left, and downstairs Cash yells something about the sad pans and Wyatt laughs, and neither of them has any idea, and I have never in my life felt so alive and so completely, gloriously stupid.

“Theo,” I whisper, when I can talk. “They’re home.”

“I noticed.”

“We are idiots.”

“Yeah.” He kisses the bite, soft, an apology his mouth makes that the rest of him would never. “Worth it though.”

Here’s the problem, and I do the whole terrible calculus of it while my heart’s still going: we can’t do the thing we usually do.