PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 21 - チャプター 30

"You're staring at your phone again."Sienna didn't look up from her flashcards. She didn't need to – she had a sixth sense for when I was spiraling and an even sharper one for when the spiral involved a boy."I'm not staring. I'm reading.""You're rereading a text from Rhys for the fourth time. That's not reading. That's forensic analysis."She wasn't wrong. The text was two words – see you tomorrow – and I'd been trying to decode the emotional temperature of a period versus no period for eleven minutes. This was who I was now. A girl who analyzed punctuation from a boy who was technically almost her stepbrother.Growth.The thing about Rhys and me was that everyone on campus knew what we were except us. He walked me to class. Found me after every game, still damp from the ice, and slung his arm around my shoulder like a claim. When I shivered outside the arena one night he pulled his jacket off and put it on me without asking and without making it a moment – just did it, like keepin

Caleb Park was a ghost I couldn't exorcise.Monday: library study group for Dr. Kim's midterm. I'd chosen this group specifically because Caleb wasn't in it – different section, different schedule, no reason to be there. He showed up anyway. Laptop and notes and that golden smile, sliding into the chair across from me like he'd been expected. "Room for one more? Kim's exam is brutal this year." Then, twenty minutes in, unprompted: "Remember when we pulled an all-nighter for Kim's class sophomore year? You threw a textbook at my head because I wouldn't stop quoting the wrong theorist."The table laughed. I watched Rhys's name flash on my phone – how's studying? – and felt the precise, surgical way Caleb had just made four years of history sound like warmth instead of a cage.Wednesday: campus coffee shop. My corner, my time slot. Except Caleb had Miles with him – my brother perched on a stool with hot chocolate and the big marshmallows, grinning so wide it cracked something in my chest

"–and you weren't there, Rhys. That's the point.""I was at practice.""You're always at practice. And Caleb is always exactly where I am, saying exactly the right thing at exactly the right time, and I'm standing there being defended by the person who destroyed me because the person I'm actually with couldn't be bothered to show up."His jaw tightened. He was leaning against the kitchen counter, arms crossed, doing that thing where his whole body went still and controlled while his eyes gave away everything. We'd been going back and forth for ten minutes and the apartment felt smaller with every sentence."I don't need to perform for people.""It's not performing. It's showing up. There's a difference.""Caleb showing up isn't kindness, Naomi. It's strategy. He defended you because it makes him look good and me look absent. That's the whole play.""I know that. You think I don't know that? But knowing it doesn't change the fact that Jade stood in front of a dozen people and called me

NAOMI’S POVHe stood in the doorway and took it.Every word. The Caleb comparison. The accusation. The truth he didn't want to hear from the one person whose opinion could actually cut him. He took it the way he took hits on the ice – absorbed it, let it land, didn't flinch.Then he stepped back. Left the door open.Not an invitation. Not an apology. Just – space. Room for me to enter if I wanted to. The Rhys equivalent of a white flag.I walked in.The apartment was dark. Takeout containers on the counter from what looked like two days ago. Books still on the floor from the table incident – neither of us had picked them up and the symbolism of that was almost funny if it wasn't so pathetic. He moved to the kitchen. Leaned against the counter. Arms crossed. Looking at me with an expression that was working hard to be steel and failing at the edges."I'm not going to apologize well," he said. Flat. Direct. "That's not something I do.""I noticed.""The shutting down thing. It's not abo

Everything was not fine.Everything was, in fact, so spectacularly not fine that I'd spent the last three days conducting a private negotiation with God, my uterus, and the universe – offering up increasingly unhinged bargains in exchange for one simple biological event that had never in my life been late before and had chosen this specific moment to go rogue.My period was three days late. And the condom had broken two weeks ago.I remember the exact moment. His apartment. Middle of the night. The pause – both of us going still, looking down, the quiet fuck he'd muttered that had nothing to do with pleasure and everything to do with a piece of latex that had chosen violence. He'd asked if I was on birth control. I'd said yes. He'd said okay. We'd moved on.Except my body hadn't moved on. My body was now staging a silent protest against every reassurance I'd given myself, refusing to bleed on schedule like a biological clock that had decided to teach me a lesson about consequences.Da