บททั้งหมดของ P^CKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A HOCKEY ROMANCE: บทที่ 121 - บทที่ 130

RHYS’ POVHer laptop wasn’t on the counter.That was the thing I couldn’t stop noticing. Not the silence. Not the dark. The counter. The specific square of granite where she’d set it every time she came over – lid open, charger trailing to the outlet behind the microwave, the cursor blinking on whatever she was writing while I cooked and she pretended to help and we both knew the food was an excuse to exist in the same room.The counter was empty. Had been for weeks. I stopped turning on the kitchen light because the kitchen light meant seeing the counter and the counter meant seeing the absence and the absence was louder than anything she’d ever left behind.3 AM. My apartment. The kind of dark that happens when you stop opening blinds because daylight requires performing and I didn’t have the energy to perform. The chipped blue mug – the one she said had character, the one she wrapped both hands around like it was keeping her alive – was in the cabinet. Face down. So I wouldn’t see

The cold hit me like a wall when we stepped outside.I swayed. The sidewalk tilting under my feet – not dramatically, just enough to remind me that three whiskeys on an empty stomach was a decision made by a woman who’d stopped making good ones. Caleb’s hand on my elbow. Steadying. Functional. The automatic gesture of someone walking a drunk person out of a bar, and I didn’t pull away because pulling away from a steadying hand when your legs aren’t working is performative, not principled.“Let me call you a car,” he said.“I’m fine.”I wasn’t fine. I was leaning against the brick wall outside the bar because the wall was solid and my legs had decided they were done being reliable for the evening. The brick was cold through my jacket. The air smelled like rain and garbage and the particular staleness of a street that existed between closing time and dawn. Caleb was standing in front of me. Close. Not crowding – present. His voice still doing the thing from inside. Soft. Low. The regist

My phone rang during a sentence I wasn’t reading.Mom.The name on the screen making my stomach tighten before I answered – every call from my mother lately had been either silence or sadness, the careful neutrality of a woman who’d stopped asking questions because the answers were all too heavy. I almost let it go. Almost pressed decline and texted call you later and turned back to the paragraph of Victorian criticism I’d been staring at for twenty minutes without absorbing a word.I picked up.Her voice was wrong.“Miles is gone. He’s not answering his phone. He’s not at the rink, he’s not at home, he’s GONE, Naomi.”My body went cold. The temperature dropping through my hands, my face, the backs of my knees, the way it always did when the world shifted under me without warning. Miles. My brother. Thirteen years old. The one person in my life I hadn’t broken yet.“How long?”“I don’t know. He went to the rink after school to pick up gear. That was four hours ago. Four HOURS, Naomi.

A few months earlierHis apartment. A Tuesday. The kind of Tuesday that existed in the early chapters of us – no crisis, no sabotage, no Caleb sighting, no family detonation. Just a man on a couch with a book he wasn’t reading and a woman lying with her head in his lap scrolling through a blog she should have been editing and the evening stretching out in front of them like something they were allowed to keep.I’d been thinking about it for weeks. The thing I couldn’t stop thinking about when things were good – how good was the warning sign, how happiness was the thing you had before the losing, how every love story I’d ever studied in Professor Chen’s class ended with the better thing being taken because the narrative demanded it.“I have a rule.”He looked down. The Gatsby open against the armrest. His free hand in my hair – the absent, continuous stroking he did while he read, his fingers finding the same path through my strands like a meditation he wasn’t conscious of. His eyes sh

The opposing captain flipped on a Saturday.No loyalty to Caleb. Plenty of resentment about being pulled into a sabotage scheme he’d never asked for. He screenshotted the full exchange and sent it to Cole – Caleb’s own words, from his own number, sent twelve hours after the parking lot call. If anyone asks, you got those plays from a source you won’t name. Not from me. Full number match. Not an area code correlation. Direct. Undeniable. A man telling his co-conspirator to stick to the story, which meant there was a story, which meant the story was his.I printed everything at 3 AM in the campus computer lab. Fluorescent lights. Empty terminals. The hum of the printer producing document after document – each page a brick I was carrying toward a building where someone had the authority to use them.I put them in a manila folder. Two dollars from the bookstore. Labelled it with the date. My handwriting. Just the date.The dean’s office. Monday morning. Dark wood. Diplomas. The aesthetic