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CADE. Incoming call.

My best friend, whose little sister I just finger fucked.

Margot goes still at the sight of the name lit up on my phone. Our eyes lock. Neither of us breathes.

I answer it. "Hey, Cade."

"Jax." Warm. Happy, even, which is so much worse than angry. "I've been getting tagged in your business all morning. My boy's finally got himself a girl. It's all over the net that you stopped dating. So who is she? Do I know her?"

I can’t lie to him so I deflect.

Chapter 6: Margot

"Callahan, I am filing a formal complaint about the rooming list."

Ryker hangs over the back of my seat on the team plane, and I don’t look up from my laptop, because I’ve learned that eye contact with Ryker is a legally binding contract.

"Denied."

"You haven't even heard it."

"It's about your roommate. It’s always about your roommate."

"Mason made me sit in total silence for forty minutes last night while he taped his stick, because talking during the tape ritual is bad luck and I quote will cost us the game."

He drops into the empty seat beside me, uninvited. "Forty minutes. I have needs. I have to check in with Claire and the baby. I need to be able to talk."

"Sounds like a Mason problem and a you problem, in that order." I finally glance at him, which is my mistake, and he beams like he's won something. "Go sit down. We land in twenty, and I have a bus, a walkthrough, and a catering order to finalize."

Here is the thing about running road logistics for twenty-three professional athletes. It is ninety percent herding, nine percent spreadsheets, and one percent pretending, to yourself and to God, that you did not assign yourself the hotel room adjoining Jax’s on purpose.

But I did.

The game that night is loud and intense, the kind of hockey that reminds you why anybody does this for a living.

I watch from the tunnel with a headset on and a clipboard I am not looking at. I tell myself I'm tracking the broadcast rundown and not the number eleven flying up the wing. Jax’s number.

Second period, tied game, and Jax picks a pocket at their blue line, and the whole building sucks in its breath at once. He's got a step.

He always has a step. He drags the defenseman out of his skates, waits the goalie out until the poor man commits, and roofs it glove side so clean the twine barely moves.

Our tiny traveling section loses its mind. And Jax, wheeling away with his arms up, finds me across the ice in the tunnel and points his stick at me before the pile buries him, and I have to relearn how lungs work.

We win it four to two. On the record, the Blizzards are flying.

The adjoining door between our rooms is unlocked and open.

Then he's through it, damp from the shower, in nothing but a towel slung low on his hips, water still tracking down all that muscle, dark hair dripping, the old scars I've mapped with my mouth catching the light, and my professionalism files for early retirement.

"You pointed your stick at me." I'm cross-legged on the bed in his stolen T-shirt, being deeply uncool about all of it.

"I score, I point at my girl. It's tradition. Plus you like my stick." He drops onto the bed and hauls me into his lap.

"I'm not your girl. I'm your image consultant. With benefits."

"Right. My apologies." He kisses one corner of my mouth, then the other, unhurried, and something in my chest goes soft and terrified at the same time, because this isn't a lesson.

It feels like he kisses me now just to kiss me. Because he wants to.