All Chapters of PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

The campus literary magazine came out on a Thursday.I found it in the English building – stacked by the door in a neat pile, the cover a muted blue with black text. My piece was on page fourteen. Anonymous, like always. No name, no photo, just the words I'd bled onto a screen at midnight sitting in the same magazine that had published actual poets and essayists and people with MFAs and futures.I read it standing in the hallway with my bag sliding off my shoulder and my coffee going cold. Seeing my words in print – typeset, formatted, real in a way that a blog post never quite was – did something to my chest I wasn't prepared for. This wasn't a screen I could close. This was paper. Permanent. Somebody had read what I wrote and decided it deserved ink.The comments section on the magazine's website was already active. Women, mostly. Saying things that made my throat tight.This is exactly how it feels. You put words to the thing I couldn't name.I've been the secret. I've been the hid

He followed me home.I didn't invite him. Didn't ask. Just walked across campus with my arms wrapped around myself and the words captain's leftovers still ringing in my skull and Rhys Maddox three steps behind me like a shadow that refused to detach."I'm going back.""You're not.""One conversation. That's all I need. Thirty seconds with that piece of–""And then what? Suspension? Expulsion? You want to hand Caleb exactly what he wants?" I spun around. The path was empty – just us and the streetlights and the sound of a party still thumping three blocks away. "You go back there and hit someone and you're the violent transfer again. That's the headline. That's all anyone remembers.""I don't care about headlines.""You should. Because I care about you playing hockey and staying enrolled and not giving Caleb ammunition to–""Caleb. Always Caleb. Everything circles back to–""You sound like him right now." It came out before I could catch it. "The version of you he warned me about. The

The post appeared at 7 AM on a Wednesday.I found it the way everyone found things on that campus – through Sienna, who shook me awake with her phone six inches from my face and an expression that made my blood go cold before I'd read a single word.@ThornfieldConfessions: Sources confirm the hockey transfer's "relationship" with Naomi Ellis started as a tutoring arrangement. She tutors him, he pretends to date her. Classic quid pro quo. The whole thing is fake. You've all been watching a performance. 🎭Twelve hundred likes. Four hundred comments. Climbing.I sat up in bed and read it three times while the room tilted around me. The comments were a massacre.i KNEW it looked too perfect - so she's literally being paid in clout?? Embarrassing - wait does that mean the caleb thing was real and she's just using maddox to make him jealous - this is so messy i'm getting popcorn - honestly feel bad for rhys. she's playing everyoneMy hands were shaking. Not from sadness – from the specific

It started that way. It didn't stay that way.Seven words. By Thursday morning they were everywhere. Screenshotted on Instagram stories with heart emojis and fire emojis and the crying-face emoji that could mean twelve different things depending on who was posting it. Quoted in the campus confessions page comments – some sincerely, some sarcastically, some in ALL CAPS with seventeen exclamation marks. A girl in my American Lit seminar had it as her phone wallpaper by lunch. Someone made a TikTok.I walked through campus that first morning feeling like I'd been turned inside out for public consumption. Every glance could have been admiration or mockery and I couldn't tell the difference. Near the science building, I heard a girl say it to her friend like a punchline – "it didn't stay that way," followed by laughter, sharp and dismissive. Thirty seconds later, outside the library, a different girl said it into her phone like a prayer – quiet, reverent, the voice of someone who recognize

Round three started in the hallway and ended in his bed and I couldn't tell you the exact moment we transitioned because his mouth never left my skin long enough for me to register the change in geography.The picture frame crashed off the wall somewhere behind my head. His hands were under my thighs, pinning me to the plaster, his hips grinding against my core with a slow, devastating pressure that made my eyes roll back. I was oversensitive from the kitchen counter – swollen, slick, every nerve ending stripped raw – and every roll of his hips sent aftershocks through me that blurred the line between too much and not enough."I can't – Rhys, I can't take–""You can." Mouth against my throat.He carried me to the bedroom with my legs wrapped around him and laid me on the mattress with a gentleness that contradicted everything his body had been doing for the last two hours. He peeled my underwear down my legs – soaked through, ruined – and tossed them off the bed without looking. Then