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I sit on the edge of my bed with the laptop and open the spreadsheet. It’s got a stupid name — THE TAB — and it’s the ugliest, most honest document I own. Rent, every month since junior year, the number that shows up in my account from my father like clockwork, no note attached, because Lucas Mercer’s whole style is showing up without a word and letting you feel the weight of it. Phone bill. The car insurance. The gas-station coffee, if I’m being a bastard about it, which on the first of the month I am. I add January. I look at the total at the bottom, and it’s a number that would put most people on the floor, and I don’t flinch from it. I stare at it until it stops being scary and goes back to being a plan.

Because here’s the thing about the money, the thing I don’t say to a single living soul: I have a full ride. Tuition’s handled — I earned that, on my skates, nobody gave it to me. But my father pays for the rest. Insisted on it, the year everything blew up, like a man trying to buy back a thing you can’t buy back, and I was seventeen and my mom was drowning and I took it, because pride doesn’t pay rent and I’m not stupid. So he pays. And every dollar of it is a string, and I can feel every one of them, all the time, running from his hand to my life like he’s got me on a line and only pretends he isn’t reeling.

The draft is the day I cut them. All of them, at once. First real check, I pay him back to the dollar — I’ve got the dollar — and then I never owe that man anything again as long as I live. That’s not the dream. Playing’s the dream. That’s the debt. And they’re wearing the same jersey, which is the whole tragedy of my life: the one thing I want most is bolted to the one thing I hate most, and I can’t get free of him without getting drafted, and I can’t get drafted if I let anything — anything — pull my head off the ice.

I close the laptop.

There’s a game-dev build open behind the spreadsheet, three weeks of work, the thing I actually love, and for a second the two documents sit there stacked on the same machine — the future I’m making for myself, and the debt I owe the man who left. Then I close that too, and I get up, because Margo’s going to be here in twenty minutes, and Margo is the exact kind of thing that pulls a man’s head off the ice.

I know that. I let her come anyway.

The house empties by one. Cash and Wyatt have a two o’clock class, Beau’s got PT, and Margo and I have a stolen hour before her practice and my next class — a gap in two impossible schedules we found the way you find a twenty in an old coat, delighted and a little suspicious. She texts five minutes out and I go unlock the side door and stand in my own kitchen with my heart going like I’m nineteen and it’s the first time, which it is not, which is somehow worse.

She comes up the back stairs so nobody sees, and by the time she’s through my door she’s already talking.

“Okay, I have exactly fifty-five minutes, I have a stunt clinic at three that I cannot be late to because Ethan will make it a whole thing, and I swear to God if you give me that look —”

“What look?”

“That look. The one that means we’re not going to have a conversation.” She drops her bag by the desk. She’s in leggings and a cropped Whitmore hoodie, hair up, and she’s flushed from the stairs and the cold, and she looks at me looking at her and her whole spine changes. “Theo.”

“You said fifty-five minutes.” I cross the room. “We’re wasting them.”

“We are not wasting them, this is highly efficient, I planned the — okay.” Because I’ve got a hand at her jaw and my mouth on hers, and the planning voice cuts out mid-word, which is my favorite thing I’ve discovered in two weeks: there’s an off switch on Margo Ashby, and it’s me.

“Fuck,” she breathes against my mouth, and it’s soft and surprised, like it got out before she okayed it, and I pull back an inch just to look at her.

“There she is.”

“Shut up.”

“You don’t cuss. Not out loud. Not the Charleston version of you.” I get the hoodie up and off, slow, watching her let me. “I like her. The one who says fuck in my kitchen. Nobody else gets that one, do they?”

“You are so —” She loses the sentence when I get my mouth on her throat. “— insufferable, oh my God —”

“That a yes?”

“That’s a shut up and keep going.”

So I do.

What I’ve learned about her in two weeks, the thing I’d never say to her face because she’d bolt: Margo spends every waking minute in control of every variable in a fifty-foot radius, and the reason she keeps ending up here isn’t the sex. It’s that this is the one room where she hands the controls to somebody else and lets herself stop.

I take them. Gladly.

I walk her back to my bed and lay her out on it and take my time getting the rest of it off her, and she lets me, going pliant and quiet the way she only goes here. When I finally settle between her thighs and look up the length of her, she’s already got a hand fisted in my sheets.

“We have fifty minutes,” she says, but it’s gone breathy, the schedule losing its grip.

“Then stop talking.” I press a kiss high on the inside of her thigh, feel her jump. “I’ve been thinking about doing this for a week. I’m not rushing it because Ethan’s got a clinic.”

I drop my mouth to her pussy and slide my tongue through her slick folds until I find her clit. I suck it into my mouth gently, and her back bows off the bed.

“That’s — oh —”

And then I stop letting her finish sentences.

I take her apart slowly. I’ve got the time and I’ve got the want, and I’ve learned her — where she’s loud, where she goes quiet, the exact thing that makes her thighs start to shake — and I do all of it on purpose, unhurried, until she’s got both hands in my hair and she’s given up on being quiet in an empty house. She rides my face without even realizing that’s what she’s doing and I’d rather die a slow, painful death than stop her. She comes the first time with my name and a word her mother would faint over, and I ride her through it and don’t stop, because we’ve got the minutes and because I’m a defenseman — my whole life is about not tiring, about the shift that outlasts the other guy’s — and I’m going to spend some of that on watching Margo come undone twice before she remembers she had a plan.