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CHAPTER 61 - EGGSHELLS

Penulis: Dirty Diana
last update Tanggal publikasi: 2026-03-20 00:14:46

The deal was dead. The fake was over. We were real – publicly, privately, no asterisk, no arrangement, no fine print. Just two people who'd chosen each other through scholarship threats and family fractures and a word on a whiteboard and every other thing the world had thrown at us.

I should have been relieved. And I was – for about five minutes. Then the real relationship started and I discovered something nobody warns you about: the fake version was easier. The fake version had rules. The rea
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  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 86 - INSTINCT

    RHYS’ POVShe was shaking.Not crying. Not talking. Just shaking – wrapped in a blanket on her bed with her eyes unfocused and her hands trembling against her knees and her breath coming in stutters like her lungs had forgotten the rhythm they'd been running for nineteen years.I didn't know what to do with that.I know what to do with a lot of things. A body check? Drop the shoulder, absorb, stay on your feet. A fight? Hands up, aim for the jaw, don't swing angry. A girl in my bed? I know what to do there too. But a girl shaking on her bed with her eyes looking at something I couldn't see and her heartbeat visible in her throat, too fast, wrong?Nothing. No play. No instinct. No training for this.So I picked her up.Didn't ask. Didn't announce it. Just slid my arms under her – one behind her back, one under her knees – and lifted. She weighed nothing. She always weighed nothing to me. This girl

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 85 - BREAKING DOWN

    The breakdown happened on a Tuesday.It wasn't dramatic. Wasn't cinematic. There was no triggering moment, no phone call, no Caleb sighting, no text that detonated the last wall standing.It was just a Tuesday.10 AM. English seminar. Professor Chen's class. A presentation I'd prepared for all weekend – Virginia Woolf, the way trauma restructures language. I knew the material. Had note cards. Had practiced in front of Sienna twice and the bathroom mirror once. Had my slides loaded and my thesis memorized and my hands steady.I stood up. Walked to the front. Twenty faces. Familiar. Safe. Professor Chen nodding from her desk with the encouraging expression she gave everyone before presentations – the you've got this face.I opened my mouth."Virginia Woolf's approach to–"And the world tilted.Not metaphorically. The room physically shifted – floor tilting left, ceiling compressing, the faces in front of me stretching and warping like reflections in water, my vision narrowed. Not blurre

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 84 - PURPOSEFUL CONSISTENCY

    2 AM. Desk lamp. The black notebook open to a fresh page and the apartment so quiet I could hear my own pulse.Sienna was asleep three feet away – face buried in her pillow, her phone still clutched in her hand with Cole's last text glowing on the screen. She'd fallen asleep smiling. I envied that. The simplicity of falling for someone who wasn't surrounded by landmines. Someone whose biggest complication was labelled snack containers and an inability to admit he was in love.I picked up the pen. Started writing.Not the shorthand version I'd been keeping in my head – the full timeline. Every date. Every incident. Every Caleb-adjacent crisis from the very beginning, laid out in chronological order with the precision of someone who'd spent months tracking a pattern she couldn't prove and was tired of carrying it in her skull.I wrote until my hand cramped. Went back. Added details. Cross-referenced. Drew lines between entries – literal lines, pen on paper, connecting the incidents to t

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 83 - BRUISES

    NAOMI’S POVHe showed up at my door smelling like ice and ibuprofen.Didn't knock the way he usually did – two hard raps, the impatience of a man who expected doors to open because he existed on the other side of them. This was different. One knock. Soft. The knock of someone who wasn't sure he was welcome and was giving me the chance to pretend I wasn't home.I opened it. He was leaning against the doorframe with his bag over one shoulder and his weight shifted to the left side – favouring his right ribs, which meant something had happened to the left ones. His knuckles were still raw from the equipment room door. Scabbed over but not healed, the skin pink and tight in a way that would scar. And blooming across his left shoulder, visible where his t-shirt collar shifted, a bruise the colour of a thunderstorm. Purple at the centre. Green at the edges. Fresh."Caleb?" I asked."Check during the scrimmage. Came in high

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 82 - SCRIMMAGE

    RHYS’ POVSaw it before the first whistle.Diamond formation. Caleb calling it from center ice with that captain's voice – authoritative, the voice of a guy who'd earned the C on his jersey and knew exactly how to weaponize it. Diamond formation puts four players in a tight box. Pushes the left wing wide. My position. Wide means isolated. Isolated means no passes. No passes means I'm skating alone on the far side of the ice looking like I don't know where I'm supposed to be.He didn't glance at me when he called it. Didn't need to. The play was the message.I followed it. Skated to my position. Watched the puck move through the diamond – Caleb to Miller to Owens to Caleb again – while I stood on the outside like a kid who'd shown up to the wrong practice. Four passes. None of them mine. The play ended with a clean goal from Caleb and a celebration I wasn't part of."Good movement," Coach Harlan said from the boards. Clipboard. Whistle. Not seeing what he wasn't looking for.Second dri

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 81 - THE LONG GAME

    The skates were Bauer Vapor Hyperlites. Second pair. Because apparently the first pair Caleb bought weren't the right fit for Miles's "evolving stride" – his words, delivered to my mother over the phone with the casual authority of someone who'd appointed himself my brother's personal development coach.My mother didn't question it. Why would she? A responsible, polished college athlete was investing time and money into her fatherless son's hockey career. That wasn't suspicious. That was a blessing. That was the kind of thing you thanked God for at dinner and posted about on Facebook with heart emojis and captions about village-raising.I couldn't say a word.Because the cruelty of what Caleb was doing was structurally identical to kindness. He showed up at every youth league practice. Drove Miles to pro games three hours away and bought him jerseys from the team store. Texted him motivational quotes before school – I'd seen them on Miles's phone. Screenshots of athletes with captions

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 39 - SLOWLY CHANGING

    Rhys got a B+ on the American Literature midterm.Three nights of flashcards and highlighters and him sprawled across his apartment floor complaining that Fitzgerald was "a rich drunk who wrote about other rich drunks" while I threatened to leave if he didn't focus. He'd focus for twenty minutes. T

    last updateTerakhir Diperbarui : 2026-03-29

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 34 - NO WORDS

    He followed me home.I didn't invite him. Didn't ask. Just walked across campus with my arms wrapped around myself and the words captain's leftovers still ringing in my skull and Rhys Maddox three steps behind me like a shadow that refused to detach."I'm going back.""You're not.""One conversatio

    last updateTerakhir Diperbarui : 2026-03-27

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 31 - HOW WE WORK

    I came to return a textbook. That was it. That was the entire plan – drop off the Gatsby anthology he'd left at my dorm, leave it on his counter, walk away before the conversation turned into something neither of us could control.The plan lasted until the parking garage.He followed me down the st

    last updateTerakhir Diperbarui : 2026-03-25

  • PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE   CHAPTER 11 - AVOIDING THE TRUTH

    I left at 5 AM like a coward.No note. No kiss on his forehead. No romantic morning-after moment where I make coffee in his shirt and we smile at each other across the kitchen like people who haven't just detonated their entire lives.I simply peeled myself out from under his arm one inch at a time

    last updateTerakhir Diperbarui : 2026-03-18
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