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I look my brother dead in the eye. "Give it a few more weeks and it’ll be over. Jax will go back to dating models."

And I watch him believe me, because I believe it too.

Chapter 11: Jax

Margot opens the door in bare feet and an apron over a soft gray sweater, hair loose, a wooden spoon in one hand, and the sight of her domestic and unguarded nearly puts me on the floor.

"You're early."

"I brought wine." I hold up the bottle. "And I figured we should get our story straight before Cade, the human polygraph shows up."

She lets me in, and I get my first look at Margot’s real life. I’ve never been here. My building has tight security, hers has none. So we decided my place would always be safer.

Her place is small and warm and so completely her it aches. Color everywhere, but organized color. Books shelved by some system only she understands. A wall of little framed prints. A couch that is clearly where she lives, with a blanket worn soft. Plants she has somehow kept alive, which surprises me for reasons I can't name.

Her place smells like garlic and something baking and, under all of it, the vanilla thing that lives on her skin and shows up in my head at inappropriate hours.

And then I see it. Folded over the arm of the reading chair by the window, white and familiar. HUNTER across the back.

My jersey.

Everything in me goes stupid and hopeful at the same time.

"Wine opener's in the kitchen draw by the sink." She follows my eyes to the chair, then crosses the room, scoops up the jersey, and vanishes with it down the hall like it's damaging evidence.

She doesn’t want her brother to see it.

I file it with the hundred other things about her I’m not allowed to want, and I tell myself the thing I always tell myself. It doesn't mean anything. She wants Ethan. It's just a jersey.

"About yesterday." I lean on the counter while she chops something with more violence than it needs. "The kiss."

"It was too much. I know. Cade nearly had a coronary in a hockey tunnel." The knife keeps moving. "We'll dial it back. Cooler for the cameras."

I watch her. "That’s your professional read… tame it down for the public or are you scared?"

The knife stops. "Don't."

"Don't what."

"Don't make it more than it is." She looks up, and there's something close to panic on her face. "I can't do this if you make it more than it is, Jax. I have a plan. I need the plan to stay a plan."

The plan is Ethan. The plan has always been Ethan. I want to put my fist through her nice print framed wall.

"Okay, tamer for the public, I agree. Whatever you need, Callahan."

Cade arrives twenty minutes later in jeans and a Bruins hoodie. He hugs his sister until her feet leave the floor and shakes my hand like we didn't grow up sleeping in each other's houses.

"Hunter."

"Callahan."

Then we sit down to the strangest dinner of my life.

Margot can cook, which is a surprise. I didn't know that about her, she was always studying when we were teenagers. Even when she came to the rink to be with Cade she had a book with her.

Cade carries the conversation the way he always has, loose and warm, a story about a rookie in Boston who taped a teammate's phone to the arena jumbotron, and for a few minutes it's just the three of us the way it used to be, before I ruined it by falling for his sister.

I laugh at his story. I mean it. I love this with him. Best friends but under it all, I feel like the lowest man alive, because he's lighting up this room trusting me, and I've had his sister in my bed. He trusts me but tonight only up to a point.