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CHAPTER 98 - AN ORDINARY LIFE
Petsa ng paglalathala:
2026-04-25 00:00:10The argument started at the grocery store.
"It's not milk, Naomi. It's nut water. They squeezed an almond and called it dairy and you fell for it."
"It has calcium."
"So does chalk. Doesn't mean I'm putting it in my coffee."
"You don't even drink coffee. You drink whatever that brown liquid is that Cole makes in your kitchen that tastes like engine failure."
"That's called drip coffee and it's fine."
"It's not fine. It's a war crime in a mug."
Pinakabagong kabanata
PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE THIRTY - MOVE IT
His bag hits the floor with a heavy, equipment-filled thud.He’s across the apartment in four strides and his arms are around me before I can finish the sentence, pulling me against his chest with the grip that means the doors are open and the man at the controls heard the word sick and the word mother and his body responded before his brain could construct a plan.I press my face into the space between his neck and shoulder – the space that smells like cedar and the rink and the body wash from the blue bottle, the smell that is the opposite of hospitals and waiting rooms and the antiseptic corridors where parents go to become diagnoses. My hands grip the back of his practice jersey the way I used to grip the back of his jersey in college when the world was too much and his body was the only architecture that felt solid enough to stand inside.“Okay.” His voice against the top of my head. “I’ll drive you to the airport.”“You have morning skate.”“I’ll drive you to the airport Naomi.”
PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE TWENTY-NINE - SURVIVE
I slide down the door until I’m sitting on the floor with my back against the wood and my hands shaking in my lap.The shaking is the body’s version of the sentence I can’t say out loud, which is that Caleb Park just told me my mother is dying and offered to save her, and the price is performing a fake relationship with the man who nearly destroyed me while hiding it from the man who rebuilt me, and every piece of the equation is designed to make saying no feel like murder.I sit on the floor for twenty minutes. The apartment quiet around me. The spreadsheet still glowing red on Rhys’s laptop. The manuscript still dead on mine. The fan’s card still face-down on the counter. The production company’s offer still on my desk.I pick up my phone. Scroll to Mom. Press call.It rings four times. She picks up on the fifth, and I know before she speaks because the fifth ring is the tell – Lorraine Ellis answers on the second ring when she’s fine, on the third when she’s busy, on the fourth whe
PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE TWENTY-EIGHT - SICK
My body goes still before my brain processes the sentence.“What did you say?”“She was diagnosed four days ago. Acute myeloid leukaemia.” He says the words carefully. “I ran into her at the medical centre while I was in her town covering a story for the sports desk. She was in the waiting room, and she saw me before I could dip.” His voice drops. “She hasn’t told you yet because she’s still processing. I came here because the treatment window is narrow and you need to know.”The words acute myeloid leukaemia are sitting in my chest cavity doing something that has no name. It doesn’t feel like pain or panic, but it’s something underneath both of those, something that lives in the place where my father’s death is stored like a recording I can’t delete. And the recording is already playing. Tuesday dinner plans. Thursday diagnosis. A countdown shorter than anyone expected because the body had already decided before the doctors were consulted.“You’re lying.” My voice sounds like it’s co
PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE TWENTY-SEVEN - OLD WOUNDS
The doorbell rings on a Thursday morning while Rhys is at practice.I’m at the kitchen table with my laptop open to the book two manuscript that hasn’t moved in six days, the cursor blinking at the end of a sentence I wrote last week and haven’t been able to follow because the sentence is honest and the honesty muscle has atrophied so severely that following it would require a version of me I’m not sure still has access to the controls. The coffee beside me is cold. The spreadsheet is still glowing red on Rhys’s laptop across the table, the twelve-thousand-dollar deficit pulsing like a wound that won’t close.The doorbell is wrong. Deliveries don’t ring – they knock twice and leave the package against the door. Rhys has a key. Cole texts before he comes over because Cole was raised by a woman who believed unannounced visitors were a sign of societal collapse.I check the peephole.The face on the other side stops my hand on the deadbolt before my brain can process what my eyes are rep
PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE TWENTY-SIX - OPPOSITE
Rhys sends me a spreadsheet at 7 AM with the subject line “foundation budget Q2.” The spreadsheet is the kind of document that Richard would be proud of – colour-coded, every cell containing a number that represents a kid who gets to skate or a kid who doesn’t.The column labelled deficit is highlighted in red because the deficit is twelve thousand dollars and the colour red is the universal language for things that are about to stop working.Twelve thousand dollars stands between Deshawn and an empty rink, and the number is simultaneously enormous and ridiculous.Neither of us has twelve thousand dollars sitting in an account, but twelve thousand dollars is exactly what Rhys’s old Nike campaign spent on a single photo shoot.The endorsement deals that Victoria’s PR strategy was supposed to protect evaporated when Victoria’s PR strategy evaporated, because the sponsors who were nervous about the stepsibling angle became sponsors who were nervous about the PR scandal angle, and the ner
PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE TWENTY-FIVE - MULTITASK
Naomi's POVThe fan’s messages have graduated from appreciation to need in approximately six weeks.The first message said “your blog saved my marriage” and the fifth said “I feel like you understand me in a way nobody else does” and the eleventh said “I came to your reading in Hillsboro and you looked right at me and I know you felt it too” and the seventeenth, which arrived this morning while I was standing in the kitchen deciding whether cold cereal or cold coffee was the more depressing breakfast option, said “why aren’t you responding? I’ve shared parts of myself with you that I’ve never shared with anyone and the silence feels weird.”I screenshot the message and send it to the lawyer Richard referred me to – a woman named PATRICIA who speaks exclusively in legal outcomes and whose initial consultation felt like being debriefed by a very expensive robot.Patricia responds within the hour with a cease-and-desist template and the instruction to document everything and engage with
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