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CHAPTER 28 - I'M STAYING
publish date:
2026-03-07 08:02:16
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PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE CHAPTER 129 - FREEFALL
The opposing captain flipped on a Saturday.No loyalty to Caleb. Plenty of resentment about being pulled into a sabotage scheme he’d never asked for. He screenshotted the full exchange and sent it to Cole – Caleb’s own words, from his own number, sent twelve hours after the parking lot call. If anyone asks, you got those plays from a source you won’t name. Not from me. Full number match. Not an area code correlation. Direct. Undeniable. A man telling his co-conspirator to stick to the story, which meant there was a story, which meant the story was his.I printed everything at 3 AM in the campus computer lab. Fluorescent lights. Empty terminals. The hum of the printer producing document after document – each page a brick I was carrying toward a building where someone had the authority to use them.I put them in a manila folder. Two dollars from the bookstore. Labelled it with the date. My handwriting. Just the date.The dean’s office. Monday morning. Dark wood. Diplomas. The aesthetic
PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE CHAPTER 128 - SECRETS
Saturday morning. Corner table. The coffee shop where Zara and I had spread evidence across surfaces for weeks, except on Saturdays it belonged to Miles. The routine we’d been building since the porch – same table, same orders, the quiet work of siblings repairing through showing up instead of promising. I arrived first. Ordered his hot chocolate before he walked in because I knew he’d pretend he wanted coffee and I knew he didn’t.Miles came through the door seven minutes late. Something off – his shoulders carrying a weight I could see from across the room. The walk of a boy who’d been holding something and had decided today was the day he put it down.He sat. Looked at the hot chocolate. Didn’t touch it.I waited. The Ellis way.He slid his phone across the table. No preamble. Caleb’s name at the top of the thread. Months of texts filling the screen.I read.How’s your sister doing? She seemed stressed last time I saw her. Then a week later: I worry about Naomi sometimes. She gets
PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE CHAPTER 127 - THE THREE-SECOND RULE
A few months earlierHis apartment. A Tuesday. The kind of Tuesday that existed in the early chapters of us – no crisis, no sabotage, no Caleb sighting, no family detonation. Just a man on a couch with a book he wasn’t reading and a woman lying with her head in his lap scrolling through a blog she should have been editing and the evening stretching out in front of them like something they were allowed to keep.I’d been thinking about it for weeks. The thing I couldn’t stop thinking about when things were good – how good was the warning sign, how happiness was the thing you had before the losing, how every love story I’d ever studied in Professor Chen’s class ended with the better thing being taken because the narrative demanded it.“I have a rule.”He looked down. The Gatsby open against the armrest. His free hand in my hair – the absent, continuous stroking he did while he read, his fingers finding the same path through my strands like a meditation he wasn’t conscious of. His eyes sh
PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE CHAPTER 126 - GRAVITY
“You’re right.”The words tasted like swallowing glass. Because saying them meant holding myself responsible for the collateral damage even though I was also the wreckage. I was both. That was the cruelest part.“People are fighting because of me. And I’m sorry.”Miles didn’t move. His shoulder still pressed against mine. The porch still beneath us. His friend’s family still laughing at something inside the house – the TV, normal life, the sounds of a world that hadn’t noticed us sitting in the dark.I wanted to explain. Wanted to lay out the investigation and the notebook and the sabotage and the months of manipulation that led to this porch. Wanted to say it’s not that simple and Caleb did this and I’m not the villain the campus made me. I didn’t. Because Miles was thirteen and he hadn’t asked for a case file. He’d asked for the truth. The simplest version. The one that fit in a sentence.“I’m not going to promise everything will be fine because I’m done lying to you.” A callback to
PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE CHAPTER 125 - COLLATERAL DAMAGE
My phone rang during a sentence I wasn’t reading.Mom.The name on the screen making my stomach tighten before I answered – every call from my mother lately had been either silence or sadness, the careful neutrality of a woman who’d stopped asking questions because the answers were all too heavy. I almost let it go. Almost pressed decline and texted call you later and turned back to the paragraph of Victorian criticism I’d been staring at for twenty minutes without absorbing a word.I picked up.Her voice was wrong.“Miles is gone. He’s not answering his phone. He’s not at the rink, he’s not at home, he’s GONE, Naomi.”My body went cold. The temperature dropping through my hands, my face, the backs of my knees, the way it always did when the world shifted under me without warning. Miles. My brother. Thirteen years old. The one person in my life I hadn’t broken yet.“How long?”“I don’t know. He went to the rink after school to pick up gear. That was four hours ago. Four HOURS, Naomi.
PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE CHAPTER 124 - NOT JUST PHOTOS
I woke up wearing his hoodie.Not deliberately – I’d pulled it on at 2 AM, half-asleep, reaching for it the way your hand reaches for a glass of water in the dark. Muscle memory. The fabric sliding over my head and for three seconds I was in his apartment with his arm heavy across my waist and his breathing slow against my neck and the world was the size of a bed and nothing outside it existed.Then I woke up fully. The smell hit me – coffee, his deodorant, something underneath both of those that was just him, that I’d never asked the name of because I liked not knowing, liked that it existed without a label. And the absence hit harder. The sleeve where his hand used to find mine. The hood that still held the shape of the last time he’d pulled it up over my hair. The fabric growing fainter every night because my own skin’s chemistry was slowly replacing his.I was erasing him by keeping him.I cried. The kind I thought I was done with – ugly, silent, face pressed into the sleeve, my b
PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE CHAPTER 42 - HALF THE STORY
I sat in the driveway for eleven minutes before I could make my hands stop shaking long enough to turn off the engine.My mom's voice was still in my ears – how COULD you and I'm finally happy and fix it – playing on a loop that got louder every time I tried to think past it. I'd driven here becaus
Last Updated : 2026-03-31PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE CHAPTER 52 - 2AM
I couldn't sleep.Twelve days on my childhood bed and I still couldn't sleep in it. The mattress remembered a version of me that didn't exist anymore – the fifteen-year-old version that was grieving and small enough to curl into the corner and disappear. The woman lying in it now was too big for th
Last Updated : 2026-04-05PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE CHAPTER 53 - MOM
She was sitting at the kitchen table when I came downstairs.Coffee in front of her. Both hands wrapped around the mug. Not drinking – holding. The way people hold things when they need an anchor and the nearest one is ceramic. She was wearing the flannel pajamas again. Second day in a row. Whateve
Last Updated : 2026-04-05PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE CHAPTER 50 - THE CALLS
My childhood bedroom was a museum of a girl who no longer existed.Participation trophies from softball lined the shelf above my desk – the sport I'd quit at fifteen when Dad died and everything that wasn't survival stopped mattering. A cork board above my bed still pinned with movie tickets and ph
Last Updated : 2026-04-04
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