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Chapter 17 — Side by Side
تاريخ النشر:
2026-07-30 19:38:49
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The Hockey Captain’s Fake Girlfriend Chapter 20 — After
LucaIsabella didn’t check her phone again until they were sitting on the tailgate of Beckett’s truck outside Levi’s Diner, milkshakes forgotten and melting between them, the adrenaline of the night finally starting to ebb into something closer to bone-deep exhaustion.“You’re quiet,” Luca said, nudging her shoulder with his. “That’s new for you.”“I’m processing.” She turned her phone over in her hands without unlocking it. “Twelve hours ago I was grading Gatsby essays. Now I’m apparently in a real relationship, defending a hardship fund, and somehow the most normal part of my night was finding out my fake boyfriend’s rival has a conscience.”“When you put it like that, it does sound like a lot.”“It’s a lot.” But she was smiling when she said it, small and disbelieving, and Luca found himself watching the curve of her mouth instead of the diner lights reflecting off the truck’s windshield. “I keep waiting to feel regret. About tonight. About saying what I said on camera. It hasn’t c
The Hockey Captain’s Fake Girlfriend Chapter 19 — Conflict of Interest
IsabellaIsabella read the email a third time, hoping the words might rearrange themselves into something less catastrophic. They didn’t.“They’re freezing my stipend,” she said, voice flatter than she meant it to be, shock working its way through her slower than it should have. “Because of tonight. Because of” she gestured vaguely between them, throat tightening “this. Us. Whatever we are now.”Luca took the phone gently from her hand and read it himself, jaw tightening with every line. “This is insane. You didn’t do anything wrong. You told the truth on camera.”“I told the truth about being in a real relationship with the person whose scholarship narrative I was hired to support.” Isabella pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes, exhaustion and panic tangling together until she could barely separate them. “That’s exactly the kind of thing that reads as a conflict of interest to a financial aid office that doesn’t care about nuance. They’re going to say I compromised the int
The Hockey Captain’s Fake Girlfriend Chapter 18 — The Decision
IsabellaSuarez lowered the phone slowly, and the pause before she spoke stretched long enough that Isabella felt Luca’s grip on her hand tighten.“The conference has suspended Dominic Hale for the remainder of the season, pending a full investigation into Coach Holloway’s conduct,” Suarez said. “Holloway’s been placed on administrative leave, effective immediately, and Ashford’s athletic director has issued a formal retraction of tonight’s video and their disciplinary request.” A breath. “Luca, you’re fully cleared. No suspension, no hearing. Your record stands clean.”The room seemed to collectively remember how to breathe. Beckett let out a whoop loud enough to startle the production crew still packing up equipment nearby, and Marco steady Marco, who’d spent the entire night trembling put his face in his hands and cried, quiet and overwhelmed, relief finally breaking through months of fear.Luca didn’t move for a second, like the news needed time to land somewhere real. Then he tur
The Hockey Captain’s Fake Girlfriend Chapter 17 — Side by Side
LucaThe red light blinked on, and Renata didn’t waste time on pleasantries this go-around.“We’re back with breaking developments,” she said, straight to camera. “In the last twenty minutes, a video surfaced online, released by Ashford University’s assistant coach, alleging that Marco Ibarra’s harassment claims were fabricated. Luca De Santis says that footage was manipulated. Tonight, we’re going to let viewers judge for themselves.”A monitor beside the set lit up, split-screen Holloway’s edited clip on the left, thirty-one seconds of stitched fragments and a damning caption. On the right, the raw, unedited file the production team had pulled in under nine minutes, timestamp intact, nearly four full minutes long.“Play it,” Luca said.The room went quiet as the real footage rolled. Marco’s voice, unbroken this time, context intact: “I keep thinking if I just told someone what he actually said to me, nobody would believe it like, if I said he threatened me, people would think I was
The Hockey Captain’s Fake Girlfriend Chapter 16 — Fabricated
IsabellaThe clip was thirty-one seconds long, and it was good good enough that Isabella’s stomach dropped even knowing, with absolute certainty, that it was a lie.It showed Marco and Luca in what looked like a hallway, heads bent together, Marco’s mouth moving in a clip so tightly edited it was impossible to hear full sentences just fragments, stitched together with a chyron underneath: ”…if we just say he threatened me… nobody will check…” The audio was Marco’s voice. Isabella was almost sure of that. Just not Marco’s words, not in that order, not meaning what the caption implied they meant.“That’s from weeks ago,” Marco said, voice climbing toward panic again. “That’s I remember that conversation, Luca, that was the day you told me it wasn’t my fault, and I said something about how nobody would believe me if I said what actually happened, and they cut it, they cut the middle out and stitched two different sentences together”“I know,” Luca said, low and controlled, one hand comin
The Hockey Captain’s Fake Girlfriend Chapter 15 — What She Said On Camera
LucaIsabella took the seat beside him like she belonged there which, Luca realized somewhere in the back of his scrambled mind, she did, contract or no contract, cameras or no cameras.“Isabella,” Renata said, gentler now, “you and Luca’s relationship became public in the middle of an already difficult story. Some viewers have questioned whether it’s genuine, or whether it’s for lack of a better phrase a PR strategy. What would you say to that?”Isabella’s hands were folded in her lap, steady despite everything. Luca watched her take a breath, watched her decide something before she spoke.“I’d say people are allowed to question it,” she said. “I questioned it too, at the start. I walked into an athletics office three months ago absolutely certain I was being handed a business arrangement, and I was right that’s exactly what it was, at first.” She glanced sideways at Luca, something soft and unguarded slipping through the careful composure. “But somewhere between then and tonight, I
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