CHAPTER 91 - SURVIVAL

RHYS’ POVThe empty dark is worse than the angry kind.Angry I can work with. Angry has edges – walls I can hit, a body I can throw into a drill until the feeling burns off. The empty dark doesn't have edges. It opens up underneath you and you fall into it and there's nothing to grab onto, nothing to fight, just a silence so complete you can't tell if you're drowning or if you drowned hours ago and haven't noticed yet.Elena's letter cracked open something I sealed shut when I was twelve years old. And now it was flooding. Nine years of concrete and she put a crack in it with two pages of cream paper and the word proud and now everything I'd buried was pouring through and I didn't have enough hands to stop it.I'd been sitting on my couch for hours. The letter was on the kitchen counter where I'd left it and I could feel it pulling at me from across the room like a second gravity. The word proud sitting in my apartment like something alive. She's proud of me.From whatever city she d

CHAPTER 92 - AMMO

NAOMI’S POVThe second call came on a Wednesday. 4 PM. Sober.I almost didn't answer. My thumb hovered over the screen for three rings – Caleb's name sitting there like a question I wasn't sure I wanted the answer to. But I'd been dodging him for weeks and dodging felt like fear and I was tired of being afraid of a phone call from a boy I'd known since I was fourteen."Naomi. Don't hang up.""Give me a reason.""Valentine's Day." He paused. Not for effect – I could hear the weight of it. The specific gravity of a man choosing his words because they mattered. "The letter. When they read it out loud. I should have stopped them. I was standing right there and I should have taken it out of their hands and told them to shut the fuck up and I didn't. I was a coward. You deserved better than what I gave you that night."I sat on my bed. The silence stretched. Because here's the thing about Caleb Park that made him the most dangerous person in my life – when he was genuine, he was devastating

CHAPTER 93 - THE ESSAY

The email came at 7 AM on a Thursday and I almost missed it because I was arguing with Rhys about whether oat milk counted as real milk."It's not milk, Naomi. It's oat water with marketing.""It has calcium.""Water has calcium if you believe hard enough.""That's not how calcium works.""That's not how milk works either and yet here we are, drinking oats."My phone buzzed. I glanced at it mid-argument, ready to dismiss it, and then I wasn't arguing anymore. I was standing in his kitchen with my coffee going cold and my mouth slightly open and the words on my screen rearranging the shape of my morning.Dear Ms. Ellis, We're pleased to inform you that your feature essay "The Women Who Love in Silence" has been selected for our spring spotlight. The piece will run in our April issue, both print and digital...The literary magazine. Not the campus one – the real one. The regional publication with actual subscribers and actual distribution and an editorial board that had rejected three o

All Chapters of PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE: Chapter 91 - Chapter 93

CHAPTER 91 - SURVIVAL

CHAPTER 92 - AMMO

CHAPTER 93 - THE ESSAY