Lahat ng Kabanata ng My Hockey Bully Stepbrother : Kabanata 141 - Kabanata 150

Summer’s PovThe last few weeks had been nothing but exams.Hard ones, easy ones, ones that sat somewhere uncomfortable in the middle. The romantic energy that had been building in the house before exams started had gone completely quiet without anyone formally announcing that it would. There was simply no room for it. Every evening was notes and past papers and revision and Crew coming home from hockey practice still in his gear and sitting straight down at the table to read because nationals were coming and he was somehow managing both at the same time without completely falling apart.No parties. No social media. Barely any phone time at all except for the calls from Richard and her mom checking in every few days.Ruby had started sleeping over because she did not want Summer to be the only girl in a house full of boys during exam period and also because Ruby studied better with company and this arrangement suited both of them perfectly.This morning the four of us were at the brea

Summer’s POVThe whole ride back my mind would not settle.Crew and Gray had gone to Tyler. They had actually gone to Tyler and told him to tell me. I kept turning that over and it kept landing differently every time. Either it was the most unexpectedly generous thing anyone had ever done for me or it was the strangest thing that had ever happened in the history of human relationships. Possibly it was both.Tyler pulled up outside the house and stopped the engine.“Thank you for the ride,” I said.I reached for the door.“Summer.”I stopped.“Can I kiss you?”I looked at him. His eyes were completely steady and completely honest and had been both of those things for as long as I had known him and I had somehow spent years looking at them and not fully understanding what I was looking at.I reached over and grabbed his shirt and pulled him toward me.The kiss was nothing like Crew and nothing like Gray.It was Tyler. It was years of being known by someone, of being seen without having

Summer’s POVI was standing in the middle of my room surrounded by open bags and I could not remember what I had already packed and what I had not.This kept happening. I would put something in the bag and then get distracted thinking about everything and come back to the bag and have to check from the beginning. I had been packing for forty minutes and was approximately halfway done.Officially dating three people.I said it in my head the way you test something to see if it breaks and it did not break. It just sat there, slightly unbelievable and completely real at the same time. We had talked about the public arrangement and agreed on keeping things quiet for now. If anyone saw her out, she was with Crew. Step-siblings who were close. Strange to some people but not impossible to explain. The other two stayed in the background until the moment was right and nobody had decided when that moment was yet.It was manageable. It was actually manageable.What was also real was that Crew an

Summer’s POVThe drive back was the longest of my life.Nobody spoke.Richard sat in the driver’s seat, my mother beside him, while the rest of us were in the back. The silence inside the car was the kind that had weight to it.I kept my eyes on the window, watching the city blur past, but my mind refused to quiet down. It kept running through every possible version of what would happen next.Would Richard end the marriage?Could something like this actually break apart what my mother had built?Would he look at her and decide she was the source of every problem that had walked through his front door?I stared out the window and told myself to breathe.I didn’t breathe properly the entire ride.****We were at the dining table.All of us.Richard sat at the head of the table, my mother beside him, Crew and Gray on one side, and me on the other.Nobody had suggested sitting there. It had just happened. The way serious things happen in houses. Everyone simply gravitated toward the most

Crew’s PovThe past few days in the house had been suffocating.Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Everyone at the same table, food on our plates, and nothing else. No conversation, no small talk, not even the usual sound of my father asking about our day.Just forks against plates and the specific silence of people who had things to say and were choosing not to say them.My father had not looked at me properly since the night of the nationals.That was the part that hurt more than I expected it to.Not the anger.The distance.Richard was not a man who expressed disappointment loudly or for long. He expressed it by going quiet, and quiet from my father felt like something had been removed from the room that I did not know I needed until it was gone.I had brought Summer into this.I had brought Gray into it too, even though we had all walked into this situation with our eyes open. It still sat on me like something that was specifically my fault.So I called the meeting.The four of us sat aro