All Chapters of Fake Dating The Dangerous Hockey Brother : Chapter 151 - Chapter 158

Ethan POVIt’s been two months since that incident. Two months since I dared to lay hands on Glinda, but now it has become a story we laugh… okay, I laugh about it because she doesn’t like talking about it. Anyways, in essence we were back to the way we used to be… always laughing, trusting each other, dating. The coffee meetings had turned into going to visit her, the letters had stopped because she finally answered my texts. We held hands again now, but only when she reached first. I never raised my voice. I never pushed. I treated every small yes from her like something fragile that could shatter if I breathed too hard.I still woke up some nights with the sound of those two slaps in my ears. The hospital stay after the beating behind the gym had left me with a permanent reminder in the form of a slight ache in my ribs when the weather turned cold. I didn’t mind the ache. It felt earned. What I minded was the way Glinda’s eyes still flicked to my hands sometimes, as if checking

Glinda POVWhen Ethan called me I rushed to his house.The line had been bad, his voice rough, broken on the single plea of “P-please come”…and then it cut out. I didn’t think and just grabbed my keys, the new ones that still felt strange in my hand, and drove the black SUV the short distance with my heart hammering hard enough to hurt. I pushed the door open the moment I arrived, and the smell hit me first, blood, sweat, the sharp copper edge of violence, and underneath it something wilder, like wet earth and pine after a storm. The living room looked like a fight had torn through it—furniture splintered, a dark smear on the floorboards, the couch shoved half out of place. Ethan sat on the edge of the ruined couch, shirtless, a gauze pad taped high on the left side of his ribs, another over a cut above his eye. Bruises were already blooming across his chest and shoulder. His lip was split. When he looked up, his eyes were too bright, too raw.“Glinda.” My name came out like it co

Glinda POV “I’m not going anywhere tonight,” I said, the words quieter than I meant them to be. “You can sleep.”He didn’t answer right away. His fingers stayed laced with mine under the covers, the scrape of his calluses familiar now against my skin. He closed his eyes first and I watched the lines around them ease, the gold ring that sometimes showed when his control slipped fading back into ordinary brown. His breathing deepened slowly. I stayed awake a little longer, listening to the steady rhythm of it, counting the places on his torso where the bruises had gone from purple to yellow to almost nothing. The claw marks were only pale ridges now. The stab wound had closed clean. Two weeks had done that. Two weeks of dinners and careful nights and the word dating still tasting strange every time one of us said it out loud.Sleep took me eventually. When I woke the light through the curtains was soft gray, early enough that the city outside still sounded half-asleep. Ethan was alre

Glinda POVEthan drove us back to his place without asking if that was where I wanted to go. I didn’t correct him. The black SUV hummed under us, the same vehicle that still felt too new, the same one he had given me the keys to on a birthday that now felt both recent and impossibly far away. When he parked and killed the engine the quiet settled heavy. Neither of us reached for the door right away.“I’m still scared,” I said into the dark.“I know.”“Of your father. Of the stranger. Of what Ronnie will do if you ever slip. Of what I might do if I keep choosing this.”He turned in the seat. The gold at the edges of his eyes caught the streetlight. “I’m scared too. Every day. But I’m still here if you are.”I got out first. He followed. Inside the house the new couch and the sealed floorboards still carried the ghost of blood and violence, but the air smelled only of the lemon cleaner he used and the faint spice of the takeout we had left unfinished days ago. He locked the door. I set