All Chapters of The Forbidden Puck: The Coach's Daughter Is Off Limits : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

123 Chapters

Chapter 31: The Shape of it

POV: RileyThe library smelled like old paper and recycled air and the particular quiet of a building that had absorbed too many secrets to be surprised by one more.I got there first. I always got there first. It was a habit built from years of arriving early to every room my father had arranged for me, checking the corners before settling, making sure I knew where the exits were before anyone else walked through the door. Old reflex. I was starting to understand how many of my reflexes had been built by a man I thought I was escaping.I picked the table by the north window. The one where Declan had sat across from me three weeks ago with his carefully timed questions and his coffee order memorized to the exact specification. I chose it deliberately. I was done letting spaces belong to the wrong memories.Ray came in four minutes later. He did not look around the room the way people do when they are performing casualness. He just walked directly to where I was sitting, like he alread

Chapter 32: Everything I Never Said

POV: Riley I did not sleep . I lay in the dark with my phone face down on the mattress beside me and the message sitting behind my eyes like something branded there. He is not alone. Four words and a photograph of Ray standing outside my building, looking up at my window, not knowing someone was behind him with a long lens and a specific intention. I had forwarded the message to Naomi at midnight and then lay perfectly still in the dark because moving felt like it would make something real that I was not ready to be real yet. Someone had been outside my building tonight. Someone who knew Ray was there. Someone who wanted me to know they were watching both of us. The surveillance had not ended with my father's phone on the hood of his car. It had just changed shape. By five in the morning I gave up on sleep entirely. I dressed in the dark. I laced my sneakers by feel. I walked to Naomi's room and knocked twice, the quiet knock we had agreed on that meant now, not later. She

Chapter 33: The List

POV: Ray I started writing at six in the morning. Not because I wanted to. Because I needed to know exactly what Hartwell had, and the only way to know that was to go back through every report I sent him in those first three weeks and reconstruct them from memory, word by word, before I lost my nerve. I sat at the desk in my room with a yellow legal pad and a pen and I made myself do it the way you make yourself look at a wound you have been avoiding. Directly. Without flinching. Because flinching is its own kind of damage. The room was cold. I had not turned the heat on. Some part of me thought I did not deserve it yet. The first report was the easiest to remember and the hardest to write down. I had sent it on a Monday evening, three days into the assignment, and it had taken me forty minutes to write six sentences. Six sentences that described Riley's attendance at the photography meeting, her questions to Pete, her preparation notes, her skating practice schedule. Six

Chapter Thirty Four: what Grief Looks like

POV: RileyRay opened the door before I knocked.He must have heard my footsteps in the corridor because the door swung inward just as I raised my hand, and he was standing there in yesterday's clothes with his hair not yet sorted and his eyes carrying the specific weight of someone who had been awake for hours doing something that cost him. I had walked across campus in the cold morning air with Naomi's enhanced photograph saved to my phone and Hartwell's message screenshot burning in my chest and by the time I reached Ray's building I was moving fast enough that my breath was coming out in sharp white clouds. I stopped in the doorway. We looked at each other for one second. That was all we needed. He stepped back and I came inside and he closed the door and the ordinary warmth of the room pressed in around me like something I had not realized I needed until it was there.The room smelled like burned paper. Faint but unmistakable. I did not ask about it. I understood without asking

Chapter 35: The Wrong Version

POV: MarvelI should have chosen a better room.That was the thing I kept coming back to afterward. Not the conversation itself, not the words Tomas said that landed like flat stones dropped into still water, not even the specific look on his face when he asked me the question I did not want to answer. Just the room. Tomas's room was on the ground floor of the Eagles residence with a window that faced the interior courtyard and a door that did not latch properly unless you pulled it all the way closed. I knew that about the door. I had been in that room a hundred times. I pulled it almost closed and sat down on the chair beside Tomas's desk and started talking, and I did not think about the gap. Half an inch of open air between the door and the frame. Half an inch that changed everything that came after.I told Tomas everything. The meeting with Hartwell. The letter of recommendation already submitted, already in motion, a done thing I had not asked for and had not earned and had ac

Chapter Thirty six: Tagged

POV: RayI saw it during the water break.We were forty minutes into practice, full pads, defensive sequences that required everyone to think and move at the same time, and I was finally in my body the way I needed to be, the ice clean under my blades, the cold sharp in my lungs, the familiar logic of the game filling up the parts of my head that had been running other calculations since six in the morning. For forty minutes I was just a hockey player. Nothing else required. Then the whistle blew for water and Derek pulled out his phone before his helmet was fully off, the way Derek always did, addicted to the thirty-second check that was never thirty seconds, and I heard him make a sound. Not a laugh. Something shorter and less comfortable than a laugh.He passed the phone to the guy beside him. That guy passed it on. The phone moved through the group the way phones move when the content is too interesting to describe and easier to just show. It reached Liam. Liam read it and did not

Chapter Thirty-seven: Inside

POV: RileyI saw Ray's message first.Don't look at your photography account. Call me first.I stared at it for three seconds. Then I opened the photography account.I know. He said not to. But I have never been good at being told what not to look at. My father built that reflex in me without meaning to, the need to see the thing directly rather than have it described, because described things always came with someone else's framing attached and I had learned early that other people's framing cost you something.The tag took me four seconds to find. The post was vague enough to be deniable and specific enough to be damaging, the careful language of someone who understood exactly how much they could say before it became a legal problem. An arrangement. A deal. A girl connected to both programs. The comments underneath it were doing the work the post itself was too careful to do directly. Forty, fifty, sixty people filling in the blanks with whatever version made the most sense to them.

Chapter 38: The Angle

POV: RileyI looked at the photograph again before Naomi or Ray arrived.Not the angle I thought. I had been wrong in the first sixty seconds, the wrong kind of wrong that comes from fear moving faster than observation. I sat back down at my desk and made myself look properly, the way Coach Farrow taught me to watch game footage of my own skating, without flinching from the part that scared me.The photograph was not taken from inside my room.It was taken through the window. From outside. The angle came in low and slightly to the left, catching my desk and the edge of my bed and the sunflowers on the sill, but the glass itself was visible at the very edge of the frame, a thin reflective line I had missed the first time because my eyes went straight to the dead flowers and stopped there.Through the window. Not inside.That should have felt like relief. It did not feel like relief. It felt like a different kind of cold, the kind that comes from understanding that someone stood outside

Chapter 39: The protective Layer

POV: RayI called her from the stairwell.Not the one in Crestwood Hall. A different one, the empty service stairwell behind the equipment room, the only place on campus I trusted enough to make this call without someone walking past and catching half a sentence they could carry somewhere else. The concrete was cold against my back. My breath came out in short white clouds even though I was indoors, the kind of cold that comes from inside rather than from the air.She picked up on the second ring. She always picked up by the second ring now. I used to think that meant she was waiting for me specifically. I had started to understand it meant something closer to the opposite, that she was always waiting, for someone, for this exact kind of call, and I had simply become the latest person to make it."There's a registered camera," I said. No preamble. We had stopped doing preamble weeks ago. "Long lens. Took a photograph through Riley's window three days ago. The device ID traces back to

Chapter 40: Three Names

POV: RileyWe used the whiteboard.Naomi's whiteboard, the one above her desk covered in diagrams I had never fully understood, wiped clean for the first time since I had known her. Ray stood at it with a marker in his hand and I sat on the edge of the bed with my knees pulled up, and Naomi sat in her desk chair turned backward, arms crossed over the back of it, watching both of us the way she watched a skater about to attempt something difficult."Every name," Ray said. "Every person you see on a schedule. Doesn't matter how unimportant they seem."I started talking and he started writing, and the list grew faster than I expected because I had never once tried to count the faces in my routine before. It is strange how many people pass through a single ordinary day when you actually stop to name them. Professor Aldine. Declan, though we both knew where he stood now. The dining hall server, Marcus, who always remembered I took my coffee with oat milk before Declan ever did. The librari

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