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CHAPTER 36 - A PERFORMANCE
publish date:
2026-03-07 08:58:29
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PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE CHAPTER 134 - THE SAME STORY
RHYS' POVThe sound that came out of me wasn’t voluntary.And I was twelve. On the porch. The backpack still on. The note in my hand – I can’t stay and this isn’t about you – words I’d spent nine years pretending I didn’t remember but remembered every single one. The car that wasn’t in the driveway. The overwhelming silence in a house where someone had just left. Someone who was here this morning was not here now and the air knew it. The shoes by the door – hers gone, mine still there. The hook where her coat lived – empty. The subtraction visible in every room I walked through looking for her before I sat on the steps and stopped looking.“I found you on the porch. Twelve years old. Sitting on the steps. You’d read the note. And when I came up the stairs you looked at me and said–”“When is Mom coming back.”I said it before he could. Because I remembered. The steps. The car. The first time I ever saw Richard Maddox look afraid.“When is Mom coming back.” Wrecked coming out of both o
PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE CHAPTER 133 - THE CONFESSION
RHYS’ POVShe’d been in the chair for two hours when the knock came.My hand still in hers. My voice gone – spent on the apology that wouldn’t come out, the confession she said could wait until tomorrow. The room had settled into the quiet that came after the worst was over. Monitors beeping. Her breathing steady beside me.The knock was wrong. Two raps. Even spacing. The knock of a man who announced himself through precision.Naomi looked at the door. Then at me. My jaw locking. My hand releasing hers. She didn’t need to see who it was.“I’m going to get coffee.”She squeezed my hand. Let go. Walked out.The door closed behind her and the room got smaller.My father stood in the doorway. Suited. Silver-templed. The hospital light making him look older than I’d ever noticed. He entered. Sat in her chair – the vinyl still warm from her body. Hands on his knees. Back straight. The way he sat everywhere. Like the chair was a boardroom and the room was a meeting he’d scheduled.Him lookin
PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE CHAPTER 132 - TIMING
The line went dead and the woman hadn’t said if he was breathing.St. Mary’s. Third floor. Please come as soon as you can. No condition. No he’s stable. No he’s conscious. Just an address and a floor number and please come – the words hospitals used when the news was too much for a phone call. Or when it was policy. Or when–My brain wouldn’t finish the sentence. Wouldn’t let me complete the thought because completing it meant considering a world where Rhys Maddox didn’t exist and I didn’t know how to be inside that world. Had never been inside it. Had been inside his orbit since a bar on Valentine’s Day and couldn’t locate the version of myself that existed before his gravity rearranged mine.Sienna was driving. My memory was fuzzy. I was in the passenger seat with my phone in my lap and my hands shaking so badly the phone kept sliding off my thighs and I kept catching it and putting it back because holding it was the only thing my hands knew how to do even though there was no one le
PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE CHAPTER 131 - EMERGENCY
NAOMI’S POVMom went to bed at 9. Miles in his room. Door closed. The house quiet with the loud emptiness of rooms that had just held grief and were still vibrating with it.I was on my childhood bed. Ceiling. The same cracks in the paint. The same view from the same mattress that had held every version of me and was currently holding the version who’d won a war and lost her mother’s engagement in the same week and couldn’t figure out which feeling to have first.My phone was on the nightstand. Silent. Face down. I hadn’t looked at it in hours. The screen was the world and the world contained a campus that was celebrating my vindication while my mother ate alone and I couldn’t hold both those things and the phone was where they lived so the phone stayed face down.The ceiling was safer.It rang.A longer, more insistent, buzz pattern that meant someone wanted real-time access to my voice. I almost ignored it. Almost let the ceiling win.Cole.I sat up before I answered. Cole didn’t ca
PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE CHAPTER 130 - ALL CRASHING DOWN
RHYS’ POVI’d already texted her.An hour ago. Before Cole got to me. Before anyone told me anything. Just me on the couch with the Gatsby open on the floor and her note between the green light pages and the math that had been doing itself for days finally reaching a number I couldn’t argue with.Where are you?Sent it. Stared at the screen. Put the phone down. Picked it up.The details didn’t add up. They hadn’t added up since the first week and I’d been burying that under rage because rage was a room I knew how to live in and doubt was a hallway I’d never learned to walk. But the note cracked something. I didn’t do it. I’m going to prove it. And when I do, I need you to forgive me for the five seconds I can’t take back. She was confessing a kiss she didn’t start while the campus called her a traitor. Adding to the pile instead of fighting it. Handing me ammunition because the truth mattered more to her than self-preservation.The playbook details were equipment-room specific. Naomi
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 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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