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I knock, once, soft.

The door opens before my knuckle’s off it, and there she is — Sloane’s beanie gone, her hair down, an oversized shirt and nothing I can see under it and her face scrubbed clean of the whole day, the after-practice her, the real one, the one nobody gets — and she looks up at me standing in a hotel hallway at one in the morning like she’s the one thing tonight that isn’t a coin still in the air — the scout, the draft, the whole rest of my life spinning somewhere over my head, and her, steady, right in front of me.

“You played,” she says, quiet, and there’s something in her voice I’ve never heard in it, low and undone, “like I’ve never seen anybody play. Do you have any idea what that did to me, watching you out there?”

“Margo —”

“Get in here,” she says. “Now. Before I say something in a hallway I can’t take back.”

And I go in, and the door clicks shut behind me. Whatever comes next, whatever this is that we’re not calling anything, I stopped being able to pretend it means nothing somewhere around section 108.

I’ll deal with that tomorrow.

Tonight there’s just her, and the quiet she gives me, and a wall between us and the two people most likely to figure us out.

We’re not going to be careful. I already know it. Neither of us is any good at careful anymore.

Chapter 9

Margo

The door clicks shut behind him, and the sound goes straight through me, the way it always does. The way it did on New Year’s and every time since — except this time I’m the one who opened it, and I’m the one who pulled him in. The whole floor is asleep. The whole night is ours. And I am not, under any circumstances, thinking clearly.

“Hi,” I say. Barely a word.

“Hi.” He’s still in his hoodie, hair dark from the shower, and he looks at me the way he looked at me when he scored on New Year’s. Like I’m the only thing in the room, and he’s been trying to get out of the habit, and it’s not working. “You okay?”

“I watched you play tonight,” I say, instead of answering, “and I need you to understand what that did to me, standing in that barn in the cold for hours. So no. I’m not okay. I’m the opposite of okay. I’m extremely not okay, in a very specific direction, and you need to do something about it.”

The corner of his mouth moves. Not a smile. The rumor of one. “Yeah?”

“Don’t make me say it a third time, Mercer.”

“Thought we weren’t doing that anymore.”

“We’re not. Come here.”

And he does.

I take his hand — just that, just my fingers closing around his in the dark — and I pull him through the sitting room, past the door to Beau and Sloane’s room, and I don’t let myself think about how close we’re cutting this. I push open my bedroom door and he follows me in and I turn and close it behind us, soft, one hand on the wood until the latch catches without a sound.

And then I turn around and he’s right there.

He doesn’t rush it. That’s the thing about Theo — he never rushes. He just lifts a hand and cups my jaw, tilts my face up, and looks at me in the dark for one long second like he’s deciding something, or like he already decided and he wants me to know it before he does anything about it. And then he kisses me, slow and deliberate, and the whole night that’s been wound up in my chest since I watched him play finally has somewhere to go.

The Burlington Marriott has thin walls, and Beau is on the other side of one of them. I know this. Theo knows this. We both know this, and we proceed anyway, which tells you everything about where we are three weeks into an arrangement that was supposed to be contained.

It’s different tonight. That’s the thing I notice, right at the start, when his hands find me in the dark of my room and it’s slow in a way it hasn’t been before. Not cautious — the opposite of cautious, because cautious died somewhere around week two. Slow because we’ve got the hours, because there’s nowhere either of us has to be until morning, because the strange hotel-dark and the muffled silence of a sleeping floor give everything a quality I don’t have a word for. Like we can actually breathe.

I get his hoodie off and he gets me out of my oversized shirt. Then his mouth is on my throat and I tip my head back and let him, because I’m tired — genuinely, bone-deep tired, the kind that comes after hours of cold and adrenaline. And something about being tired makes me honest in a way I usually can’t afford.

“You were incredible out there,” I breathe into his hair.

“Don’t.”

“I’m serious. That last period — the way you just — you didn’t let them in. Not once. You just stood there and ate everything they had and didn’t move.”

“Margo.” His voice is rough. “Stop talking before I do something embarrassing.”