All Chapters of PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE: Chapter 151 - Chapter 160

166 Chapters

CHAPTER 151 - THE COUNTDOWN

Come with me sat on the kitchen tiles for three days like something neither of us could step over or clean up.Rhys didn’t repeat it. Didn’t push. Didn’t bring it up over breakfast or during the drive to his practice or in the dark before we fell asleep. He just let the words exist in the apartment the way you let a bruise exist on your body.I couldn’t leave them. I told him that on the kitchen floor with my ribs against his and his arm clamped around my waist and his fingers pressing a slow line into my thigh. “Not now. Not when we just got them back.”He thought I meant the university. The column, the degree, the literary magazine I’d built from a blog and a dorm room and a refusal to be erased. He was doing the math he’d inherited from Elena – woman looks at a man’s contract 3,000 miles away, woman chooses her own architecture. He’d watched that equation solve itself before. His mother solved it by leaving. He assumed I’d solve it the same way, except I’d be the one staying and he

Last Updated : 2026-06-12

CHAPTER 152 - COME BACK

The cardboard boxes stacked against the bedroom wall looked like headstones in the dim light.Everything was packed. Clothes, dishes, gear, the weights from the living room floor – taped and labelled in black marker, reducing months to inventory. The only things left uncovered were a copy of Gatsby sitting on a packing crate by the door and the mattress. The bed was the single piece of furniture left assembled, a stark island in the middle of an empty room.Rhys sat on the edge, head down, elbows on his knees. The low hum of the city outside the glass was a constant, mocking reminder that July had arrived. His gear bag was zipped. Keys on the counter. The plane ticket was already in the pocket of his leather jacket.I stepped into his space, bare feet silent on the floorboards. My throat was so dry it felt like paper.He didn’t look up. His shoulders dropped in one long exhale. His hands came up on instinct, his fingers locking around my waist to pull me flush against his chest. No de

Last Updated : 2026-06-13

CHAPTER 153 - GO BE GREAT

The windshield wipers kept a steady rhythm against the glass, clearing the grey morning mist but doing nothing for the airless quiet inside the car.Rhys sat in the passenger seat, his frame hunched under his leather jacket, hands deep in his pockets. He hadn’t looked at me since we cleared the campus exit. Eyes fixed on the grey blacktop, jaw locked so tight the muscle in his cheek looked like stone.In the backseat, Miles was silent. He’d insisted on coming, his hands shoved into the pockets of his oversized number seventeen jersey. The black block letters across his thirteen-year-old shoulders read MADDOX – the permanent mark of a loyalty shift that had cost our family its baseline security but had given my brother a person worth lacing up for.I parked in the terminal lot. The ignition cut out with a sharp click that officially ended the countdown.Nobody moved for thirty seconds.Rhys threw his door open first. He hauled his gear bag from the trunk, his left arm – the one with th

Last Updated : 2026-06-13

CHAPTER 154 - THINNING

The blue-white glow of the phone screen was the only light left in my dorm room.Three weeks. That’s how long his cedarwood cologne had been fading from the oversized black hoodie I’d stolen from his closet before the airport. Every night at ten, the screen would light up, his face appearing in a digital box that felt increasingly small.He was sitting on a mattress on the floor of his new Portland apartment. Behind him, the wall was bare except for the framed B+ Gatsby essay I’d hung on his old wall. On my side, the desk was cluttered with his photocopied margin notes and the chipped blue coffee mug he’d left behind. Two rooms separated by three thousand miles of fibre-optic cable and a time zone that made every conversation feel like we were speaking from opposite ends of a tunnel.“The left winger is forty pounds heavier than anyone at Thornfield.” He was lying on his back with his arm thrown over his eyes. “Skates like a tank. Takes lines nobody else can touch.”“Did you check him

Last Updated : 2026-06-15

CHAPTER 155 - NOT A BRIDGE

I let the phone ring twice before I answered. Not because I was nervous. Because I was already wet and I needed the extra four seconds to decide whether to tell him or let him figure it out.I swiped.The connection stuttered, pixelated, then resolved into Rhys’s face, his Portland apartment in the background – bare walls, the framed Gatsby essay, which was the only thing he’d hung, a mattress on the floor because he’d been there two months and still hadn’t bought a bed frame.His hair was damp from a post-practice shower and his jaw had that locked, guarded line it got during the weeks when the calls were getting shorter and the texts were getting more functional and the distance was doing what distance does to people who learned love through skin.His eyes dropped.I was wearing his away jersey. Number seventeen. The silver-and-blue mesh hanging past my thighs, MADDOX across my collarbones in block letters. Underneath it – nothing. I’d positioned the phone on my nightstand at the ex

Last Updated : 2026-06-15

CHAPTER 156 - ACCEPTED

The acceptance appeared at 9:02 AM on a Tuesday. No fanfare. Just a line of text on the student portal that rearranged my life in eleven words.Status: Admitted. Full Fellowship Track. Portland State University Creative Writing Program.I closed my laptop. Put on my jacket. Walked out of the dorm before the walls could close in.The bench outside the English department. Concrete cold through my jeans. July sun cutting through the campus elms in sharp patches. I sat with my hands in my pockets and my knuckles trembling against my car keys and let the decision I’d already made catch up to the rest of me.Portland. Full ride. The best writing program on the West Coast.And the question that had been sitting in my chest since the night I submitted the application at 11:58 PM without telling anyone: was I going for the program or for the boy?Because I’d watched this movie before.Elena packed a bag and followed a man into a life that revolved around his gravity and she disappeared inside

Last Updated : 2026-06-16

CHAPTER 157 - HOME

The hallway smelled like industrial carpet cleaner and rain.Three flights of stairs because I couldn’t stand in an elevator for thirty seconds without losing my nerve. My backpack was cutting into my shoulders and the suitcase wheel had been sticking since baggage claim. I was two weeks early and I hadn’t told him, and the fellowship stipend had processed ahead of schedule.My lease was signed and I was HERE – standing in a Portland apartment corridor at 4 PM on a Wednesday with my hair still damp from the airport rain and my heart slamming against my ribs like it was trying to evacuate my body before I did something irreversible.Door 314. The numbers slightly crooked on the panel. An unpolished detail that didn’t belong to any room Richard Maddox had ever paid for. This apartment was Rhys’s. Bought with his own money, furnished with his own bad taste.I knocked. Three times. Hard. The way you knock when you’ve spent two months talking to a screen and the screen isn’t enough and the

Last Updated : 2026-06-17

CHAPTER 158 - PORTLAND

Same area code. Different lease.My apartment was a brick studio three miles south near the river, the window glass rattling every time the streetcar ground past. I took the 14 bus to his neighbourhood most mornings, laptop bag heavy against my ribs, watching the Portland mist roll off the bridges. We’d agreed on the space before the boxes left the dorm. It was the first line we drew on purpose – proving we could share a zip code without collapsing into a single outline. I wasn’t Elena. I had my own keys and my own rent and my own name on a mailbox that didn’t say Maddox.But the logistics of peace were heavier than I expected.After my Tuesday workshops, his motorcycle would cut through the rain outside the humanities building. I’d swing my leg over the seat and lock my arms around his waist and press my face into his leather jacket while the city smeared into amber streetlamps. The ride to his apartment took eleven minutes and neither of us talked because the engine was too loud and

Last Updated : 2026-06-18

CHAPTER 159 - PUBLISHABLE

My MFA advisor had silver-framed glasses and the demeanor of a woman who’d spent thirty years cutting fat from prose the way surgeons cut fat from bodies – without sentiment, and with the understanding that what remained would be stronger for the loss.She tapped my manuscript with her pen. A slow, rhythmic click that made my lungs forget their job.“This is publishable,” she said. “Not in a magazine. As a book.”I sat in her office chair and let the word settle. Book. The blog posts that started at 2 AM on a dorm room floor. The anonymous confessions about forbidden desire that ten thousand strangers read and shared and said this is the most honest thing I’ve ever felt. The investigation chapters. The separation chapters. The kitchen floor chapters. All of it – the whole sprawling, devastating, filthy, honest mess of it – and a woman with thirty years of editorial precision was telling me it had a spine.I brought the first chapter to Rhys that night. His apartment. The mattress he’d

Last Updated : 2026-06-19

CHAPTER 160 - UNDER THE SAME SKY

The Portland lookout didn’t have a dirt road. It had a paved scenic pull-off with a metal guardrail and a sign that said NO PARKING AFTER 11 PM, which Rhys ignored the way he ignored all administrative suggestions that conflicted with his priorities.We sat on the motorcycle. Engine off, ticking as it cooled. The city below was a grid of amber and silver – bridges tracing the dark river, lights sprawling wider than Thornfield ever sprawled. Bigger city. Louder city. A city that didn’t know us and didn’t need to.Same sky though. Orion above the treeline – the three-star belt cutting clear and bright through the dark.I leaned back against his chest. His arms around my middle. Hands locked over my stomach. No mask tonight. No captain posture or pro-athlete jaw. Just Rhys – the version that only existed when we were alone and high up and the city was far enough below to feel theoretical.I reached up and slid my finger under his sleeve. Found the ink. Orion on his shoulder – the constel

Last Updated : 2026-06-21

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