บททั้งหมดของ P^CKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A HOCKEY ROMANCE: บทที่ 131 - บทที่ 140

NAOMI’S POVMom went to bed at 9. Miles in his room. Door closed. The house quiet with the loud emptiness of rooms that had just held grief and were still vibrating with it.I was on my childhood bed. Ceiling. The same cracks in the paint. The same view from the same mattress that had held every version of me and was currently holding the version who’d won a war and lost her mother’s engagement in the same week and couldn’t figure out which feeling to have first.My phone was on the nightstand. Silent. Face down. I hadn’t looked at it in hours. The screen was the world and the world contained a campus that was celebrating my vindication while my mother ate alone and I couldn’t hold both those things and the phone was where they lived so the phone stayed face down.The ceiling was safer.It rang.A longer, more insistent, buzz pattern that meant someone wanted real-time access to my voice. I almost ignored it. Almost let the ceiling win.Cole.I sat up before I answered. Cole didn’t ca

RHYS’ POVShe’d been in the chair for two hours when the knock came.My hand still in hers. My voice gone – spent on the apology that wouldn’t come out, the confession she said could wait until tomorrow. The room had settled into the quiet that came after the worst was over. Monitors beeping. Her breathing steady beside me.The knock was wrong. Two raps. Even spacing. The knock of a man who announced himself through precision.Naomi looked at the door. Then at me. My jaw locking. My hand releasing hers. She didn’t need to see who it was.“I’m going to get coffee.”She squeezed my hand. Let go. Walked out.The door closed behind her and the room got smaller.My father stood in the doorway. Suited. Silver-templed. The hospital light making him look older than I’d ever noticed. He entered. Sat in her chair – the vinyl still warm from her body. Hands on his knees. Back straight. The way he sat everywhere. Like the chair was a boardroom and the room was a meeting he’d scheduled.Him lookin

I woke up and the first thing I did was count his breaths.Not consciously. My hand was still in his – cramped, the fingers stiff from holding the same position all night, the vinyl chair having left a pattern on my thigh I could feel through my jeans. The monitors beeping. His chest rising. Falling. Rising. I counted four before I let myself blink. Before I let my brain move past the single task it had assigned itself sometime during the night: confirm he’s breathing. Confirm again. Now you can exist.My neck was wrecked. The angle I’d slept at would punish me for a week and I didn’t care because the alternative was the dorm bed where he wasn’t and this chair where he was and the math on that was simple. The room smelled like antiseptic and recycled air and underneath both, faintly, him – his skin, his sweat, the underneath smell I knew from pressing my face into his neck at 2 AM except now it was mixed with hospital and the mixing was wrong. Like hearing a song you loved played on t

Richard showed up at Rhys’s apartment with groceries.I heard the knock from the kitchen where I was reheating soup Sienna had dropped off. Two raps. Even spacing. I opened the door and Richard was standing there with two paper bags from the expensive market on Fifth. The one that charged eleven dollars for orange juice and had a cheese counter that required a number.He didn’t greet me. Walked past with the hospital nod – the new one – and went straight to the fridge. Started unpacking. Milk, full fat, replacing the expired carton I’d been meaning to toss. Eggs. Bread. Penne rigate with the blue label. My pasta. The brand I always used. The one I’d been making in this kitchen since the first night I cooked for Rhys and oversalted everything and he ate it anyway.Richard Maddox had noticed which pasta I bought and purchased it without saying a word. That was his version of an apology. Groceries instead of sentences. Provisions in place of the words his mouth couldn’t manage because hi

NAOMI'S POVThe cast came off on a Wednesday and by Thursday night his hands were on my face.Both of them.I watched him flex the left one in the car outside the orthopaedic clinic – open, close, open, the tendons moving stiff under skin that was pale from weeks under plaster. The fingers slower than the right. Slightly swollen at the knuckles. Him rebuilding his grip strength one squeeze at a time.By the time we got to his apartment I could feel the wanting coming off him like a frequency. But this time it was different. He was patient and careful, like I was made of something that might shatter.We got through the door.His hands – both – on my face before the door clicked shut. The left one slightly stiff, the grip uneven, the fingers pressing harder than they needed to because they were relearning pressure after weeks of nothing. The right one steady, certain, the thumb sliding along my jaw the way it always had. Both hands framing my face the way I’d been dreaming about since a