All Chapters of PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE: Chapter 181 - Chapter 190

He comes home at a normal hour on a Tuesday and the normalcy of it is so disorienting that I look up from the laptop in shock.5:43 PM.The door is opening at a time when doors are supposed to open, the keys landing on the counter in the spot where keys are supposed to land, his jacket hung on the hook instead of thrown over a chair because he’s not rushing. He’s not checking his phone or mentally partitioning the next forty minutes into blocks that belong to other people. He’s just HOME, in the kitchen, at a human hour, walking past my chair toward the fridge with the unhurried stride of a man who has an evening ahead of him instead of a schedule.I grab his waistband as he passes.My fingers hook into the fabric before my brain has formed a plan, the wanting arriving in my hand before it arrives in my head, because I haven’t touched him without a clock running in weeks and his body is RIGHT HERE moving past me at a pace that doesn’t require efficiency. The proximity of him combined

The sweatpants have a hole in the left knee and a pasta stain on the thigh from Tuesday’s dinner. They’re the ugliest thing I own and I’m wearing them on the couch at 9 PM while a woman in an emerald dress worth more than my advance has her hand on my husband’s arm in a photograph that fourteen thousand people have already liked.I watch the stories from the beginning because watching from the beginning is the thing my body does when my brain knows it shouldn’t – the same compulsion that made me read the comments under the Sasha restaurant post, the same instinct that makes people press on bruises to check if they still hurt, and they always still hurt, and I press anyway because the pressing is its own kind of information.Story one: the venue. Some ballroom with chandeliers and the specific golden lighting that makes every person in the frame look like they were born into a tax bracket I can’t pronounce.Story two: Rhys at a table with teammates, his tuxedo fitting him in a way that

His practice ended eight minutes early due to a scheduling conflict with the arena’s resurfacing crew, and the extra two minutes feel disproportionately exciting relative to the actual value.He walks through the door while I’m sitting at the counter, pretending to work on the manuscript that hasn’t moved past one sentence in eleven days. He crosses the kitchen with the post-practice energy that I used to love – the charged, physical hum of a body that’s been skating for two hours and hasn’t fully transitioned from athlete to civilian – and his mouth is on my neck before his bag hits the floor.“Twenty minutes,” he says against my skin, and it hits me that numbers have now become a unit of measurement in our marriage – a fixed quantity that defines the boundaries of what’s possible, and what’s possible in twenty minutes is his hands shoving my shorts down while I unzip his pants.In a flash, his cock is pushing into me against the counter, the jersey is still on and the coffee maker i

I’ve been sitting on the cold kitchen floor for eleven minutes on a random weekday with my back against the cabinet and my knees pulled up.The linoleum is pressing through my sweatpants with an unforgiving chill that reminds me it was never designed for human habitation, but at the same time, it has become the place where every honest conversation in my marriage happens.The dishonesty of the last three months has been accumulating in my chest.He’s beside me. Same position. His shoulder against the cabinet next to mine, close enough that I can feel his body heat through both our sleeves without the sleeves actually touching.He came home from practice and found me on the floor and didn’t ask why, just walked across the kitchen and slid down the cabinet and sat because he’s learned the geography of this marriage well enough to know that the floor means truth and truth means sitting and sitting means waiting until the words are ready to come out in the order they need to arrive.I go

NAOMI'S POVThe bed has been a crime scene for three months and neither of us has acknowledged it until tonight.I stand in the doorway of our bedroom and look at the mattress intently.This is the bed where I lay awake after the conference room while he slept on the floor. This is the bed where his phone buzzed on the nightstand and his eyes went to the screen for three seconds before they came back to me. This is the bed where I flinched my hand away from his chest in a motion so small it might have been invisible and so large it rearranged the entire architecture of how we sleep, because after the flinch I stopped pressing my palm flat against his heartbeat at night and started curling my fingers inward against my own sternum instead.He’s behind me in the doorway with his hand on my hip.“The bed,” I say quietly.He doesn’t answer with words.His hand on my hip tightens and he turns me toward him in the doorway, then his mouth finds mine with a slowness that makes my ribs ache.He