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"You’re my image consultant. Who, I think about on the ice."

"You do NOT think about me on the ice."

"I think about you everywhere, Callahan. It's starting to hurt my plus-minus."

And there it is, the thing I keep tripping over, the thing that scares me more than getting caught.

This doesn't feel like an arrangement anymore. It feels like a life. I want it so badly I could cry.

My plan didn’t account for any of this.

A knock lands on his door. We both go still.

"Hunter." Noah's voice, muffled, right on the other side. "Breakfast got moved. Are you coming?"

Sitting in Jax’s lap, I realize I’m closer than I’ve ever been to blowing up my heart for a boy.

Chapter 7: Jax

Four weeks of having Margot. And somewhere during that time,

I stopped believing it was short term and started drowning in her, and I didn't notice I was under until my lungs were already full.

Because I'm in it. All the way in, no bottom to touch.

I’ve started, God help me, thinking about the future, a real life with her in it, and every time I catch myself doing it I want to check myself into the boards.

Because I can't have it. Two reasons, and they're both fatal.

The first is Ethan. The one who gets her. I'm the drill. The practice run.

The second is worse. The second one has slept on my couch and bled next to me on a hundred sheets of ice and called me his brother since we were kids.

Cade trusts me with her. Keep an eye on my sister, and I said yes, and then I got her into my bed, and there’s no version of this where he doesn't look at me one day and understand exactly what I did with the trust he handed me.

How did this ever sound like a good idea? I said the words myself, in her video room, like a man who had it handled. I did not have it handled. I have never had anything less handled in my life.

She's back at the hotel, and I thought the distance would clear my head for the game tonight.

It doesn't. I take the ice in front of twenty thousand people for the biggest game of the road trip, and my head is sitting in a hotel room with a woman I'm not allowed to keep, and I cannot for the life of me keep the damn puck.

I lose us the game in the third period, and I know the exact second it happens.

Tie game, two minutes left, and I've got the puck on my stick at their blue line with a clean lane, and for half a second my head is not in the building.

It's on Margot.

Their D reads me, steps up, strips me clean, and they go the other way two-on-one and bury it, and the horn that ends it might as well be aimed at my chest.

Our locker room after a bad road loss is the quietest place on earth.

Mason stripped down to his lucky shirt, the gray one that should have been burned two seasons ago, muttering that somebody, and he is looking dead at Ryker, jinxed us by saying the word shutout in the second.

Ryker throws up both hands. "I did not say shutout."

"You said the word. We do not say the word." Mason points a blocker at the room like a prophet calling down the weather. "That loss is on your mouth."

"No. It was on my giveaway." I own my loss. The room lets it go, because road losses happen, but I don't let it go, because I know exactly what my head was doing on that blue line and it wasn't hockey.