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Loving your brother's best friend is a special kind of stupid. You get a front-row seat and a strict no-touching rule.

You learn all his tells and the exact tilt of his mouth right before Jax says the thing that gets him benched, and you file all of it in a folder marked DO NOT OPEN, and then he pours your beer down a sink and smiles at you and the folder goes up in flames.

Because you think you have a chance. That he might want you too.

I'm still standing there, quietly combusting, when he glances back over his shoulder and finds me across the room and holds my gaze.

My heart does something athletic and humiliating.

Down, girl. We've been over this.

He has never once looked at me the way I have perfected looking at him when he isn't paying attention.

Until an hour later, when he does.

He finds me by the coat pile, where I've fled to breathe and to stop cataloguing his forearms like evidence.

He closes the door but leaves it slightly open and the music goes muffled.

He plants one hand flat above my head, and the heat pours off him, all warm boy, and every clever thing I've ever known flies out of my brain in a calm single line.

"You want to know what I’m thinking about?" His voice drops into a register I feel in my soul.

More than I should.

My whole body tips towards him before my brain can file an objection. This is the part where the smart girl says something clever.

I own an arsenal. Instead I stand there like a woman watching her own house catch fire, thinking, finally, finally...

A kiss.

His mouth finds mine.

A question first, so soft. His hand curves gently around my jaw like I'm something that might break, and the question becomes an answer, and for one blazing second the whole world shrinks to the taste of him and the impossible fact that I did not make this up, that every mortifying page of my journal was building to exactly this.

Then I taste the beer. And this precious second of his mouth on mine, splits clean down the middle.

I know this story. I've watched it play out a dozen times from the cheap seats.

Jax reaches for whatever's warmest, and by morning he laughs it off with that grin and calls it nothing. No harm done. I’m not going to be nothing.

I have zero interest in becoming the mistake he can't quite remember making.

I turn my head. His lips land on my cheek.

"You’re drunk." My voice comes out of me in pieces.

"Margot." Something shifts behind his eyes, steadier than any drunk has a right to be, clear in a way that makes my idiot heart throw itself at the bars of its cage.

For half a breath he looks like he means it, like I've had him wrong for years, like the story I've told myself a thousand times is missing its last page.

No. I don't get to rewrite the ending because I want it. Because I want him.

"Margot, wait." His fingers catch my wrist.

I hear Cade's laugh, closer, and I watch it happen in real time. I watch Jax rearrange his own face. Like he just sobered up.

The steadiness drops away like he snipped a wire, the loose grin climbs back into place, and he shoves off the wall with a sway that was not there seconds ago.