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His voice drops. "You should get that."

I don’t move.

Chapter 4: Margot

"You missed my street and now we're in a neighborhood I cannot afford to be murdered in."

Jax keeps one hand loose on the wheel, the other draped over the gearshift, city light sliding gold across his face and gone again. "We're not going to your place."

"The tabloids got their photos of you and you normally drop me home like a gentleman." Weeks of this. Weeks of frustration on my part.

Weeks of not touching me, his mouth only grazing my ear to feed me a line, and his laugh doing felony damage to my professionalism.

We seem like co-workers. But it feels like we're really good friends. I learned so much about him these past few weeks.

He seems like the boy I grew up with. Maybe even better.

But Jax just hasn’t made a move. Weeks of lessons that have stayed, to this point, strictly theoretical. "Where are we actually going?"

He lets the answer drop. "Lesson one."

My whole body surges with warmth from his tone. Like this all starts now.

He pulls into a garage beneath a building that’s all glass, and the elevator opens straight into his apartment.

I expected mirrors and a neon sign pointing the way to his bedroom. Instead there are warm walnut wood floors and low lamplight. A wall of windows cradling the whole lit-up city. It's beautiful and cozy. Any woman would be happy here.

His kitchen actually looks used, and he has lots of books, real physical copies, stacked neatly in a few places.

His place smells like something savory and I see the slow cooker puffing out little bits of steam.

"You cooked." It comes out of me like an accusation. Like I’m in shock. Why would he do this?

"Don't tell anyone. Ruins the brand. Got to keep my real image a secret" He drops his keys in a bowl and shrugs off his jacket, and under it all he’s just a man. No cameras, no chirping, no headlines. Just a gorgeous man who cooked for me.

"Are you hungry?"

"Who else have you brought here?" I don't mean to ask it. It falls out of me.

He goes still, standing near the kitchen island. I watch his face change into something quiet and serious. "Nobody."

"Nobody as in you're being modest, or..."

"Nobody, Margot. Ever. This place is mine. I don't bring women here." He turns to the cooker and the moment shuts like a door. "Sit. You can't learn anything on an empty stomach."

He says sit, but I don't sit. While he works at the stove I drift towards the mantle.

I expect trophies. A puck under glass, a game ball, the usual shrine an athlete builds to himself. There's none of that here.

There are pictures. Framed, the kind my grandmother keeps. One with his whole team caught mid-dogpile. I move down the mantle, touching each picture as I go.

Jax and his mom squinting into the sun outside some rink. Jax and Cade at eighteen, arms slung around each other's necks, feral and happy. And on the end, in a plain black frame, a photo of me.

Me at my graduation grinning. Cap on crooked, diploma crushed to my chest.

Everything in my chest goes very still. Why does Jax have a framed picture of me on his mantle?

Don't. Don't you dare. Cade posts everything, he probably dumped it in the group chat with some proud caption, Jax printed it. Don’t read more into it.