Alle Kapitel von Pucking Hate You, My Bully Captain : Kapitel 71 – Kapitel 80

Ryder’s POVThe towel around my neck suddenly felt like the only thing anchoring me to the room. I stood there, dripping, staring at my own phone in my brother’s hand like it had turned into something foreign and dangerous.“Give me that.” I crossed the room and snatched it back, more force in the motion than I intended.Matthew let it go without a fight, hands raised slightly, but his eyes never left mine. “Ryder.”“It’s nothing.”“You’ve got about two hundred texts with someone named Zach that range from arguing about a class project to…” he paused, choosing his next words with visible care, “…things that don’t read like arguing about a class project. You can’t call that nothing.”My chest tightened. I turned away, busying myself with hanging the towel somewhere it didn’t need to go, buying seconds I didn’t know how to spend. “You shouldn’t have gone through my phone.”“I wasn’t trying to. It buzzed, I glanced at it, saw the pinned chat and then I kept reading because something told

Ryder’s POVThe night air hit differently this time.Not like three days ago, when I’d driven until the city gave way to cliffs and fog just to escape the noise in my head. This time I drove with a destination in mind, even if my hands didn’t fully believe it yet, even if some old, familiar voice in the back of my skull kept whispering all the reasons I should turn the car around.I ignored it. For once, I actually ignored it.The streets blurred past, familiar in a way that felt almost surreal, the same road I’d taken a hundred times before, the same turns, except everything about tonight felt sharper, more permanent, like I was finally seeing the route for what it actually was instead of just another path to somewhere I didn’t want to think too hard about.My phone buzzed in the cupholder. Matthew.I answered on speaker, both hands steady on the wheel. “Hey.”“You left without a word, man. What’s going on?”“I’m going to get him back.”Silence on the other end, just for a beat, and

Ryder’s POVMatthew was still on the couch when I walked back in, phone abandoned on the cushion beside him, worry etched plainly across his face the second he took in my expression.“That bad?”“He shut the door on me.” I dropped into the chair across from him, elbows on my knees, head in my hands. “Gently. Which somehow made it worse.”“Talk me through what happened.”I did, every detail from the hesitation before he let me in, to the flicker of something real behind his eyes when I called out the lie in his kitchen speech, and the wall that slammed back into place right as I thought he might finally tell me the truth.“He asked me to leave,” I said, voice hollow. “So, I left.”Matthew was quiet for a moment, processing. “But he didn’t deny it. Not really.”“No. He just said he couldn’t handle it right now.”“That’s not the same as him telling you it’s over, Ryder. Not even close.” Matthew leaned forward, elbows on his knees, mirroring my posture like he wanted to physically close th

Ryder’s POVThe city thinned around us as we drove, streetlights giving way to the sparser glow of the residential edge of campus, the kind of quiet that only exists in the hour after midnight when even the most stubborn students have finally surrendered to sleep. I kept both hands on the wheel, knuckles pale, my mind refusing to settle no matter how hard I tried to steady it.Matthew sat beside me, quiet in a way that felt deliberate, like he understood I needed the silence more than I needed conversation right now. Every few minutes I caught him glancing over, not with worry exactly, more like a silent kind of vigil, making sure I hadn’t disappeared back into myself somewhere between one red light and the next.I let my mind wander back to everything he’d said tonight, turning it over and over like a stone I couldn’t stop rubbing smooth. My options had been made simple by him;Golden and empty, or disowned and honest.And they had lodged themselves somewhere behind my ribs, and no ma

Zach’s POVRyder returned and held me again for a long time before either of us said anything else, long enough that my breathing finally started to even out against the steady rhythm of his own. When he finally pulled back, his hands stayed braced on my shoulders, thumbs brushing slow circles like he was trying to physically ground me in place.“Matthew’s downstairs, he needed me to explain what was going on,” he said gently. “We’re going to figure out how to handle this properly. Get ahead of it before it gets worse.”“How do you get ahead of something like this?” My voice came out raw, scraped thin. “It’s already everywhere, Ryder.”“I know you’re scared, and this is all so unfair. But you’re not alone this time, Zach. Let me worry about handling this.” He pressed one more kiss to my forehead before stepping back, and I felt the loss of his warmth immediately, like a door closing on something I wasn’t ready to let go of yet. “In the meantime I need you to sit tight for a bit. Don’t