All Chapters of PINNED BY MY STEPFATHER (MxM): Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

Chapter 51Derek’s POVMom’s voice came down the hallway again, clearer this time, still rough with sleep.“Derek? Is someone here?”Lena froze with her hand still on the strap of her bag. Marcus went completely still behind me. The three of us stood in the living room like the air itself had locked in place. The soft sound of Mom’s bare feet on the hallway floor reached us a second later.I turned toward the sound. “Yeah. It’s just Lena. She stopped by.”Mom appeared at the end of the hall in her robe, hair messy from the pillow, blinking against the living room light. She took in the scene in one slow look, Lena standing near the door, Marcus near the counter, me caught between them and the sleep cleared from her face.“Lena,” she said. “It’s late. Is everything okay?”Lena’s expression shifted fast. The determination

Chapter 53Derek’s POVMom was sitting on the edge of the couch when I came back into the living room, elbows on her knees, staring at the dark television screen like it might eventually offer an explanation the photo hadn’t. The phone remained face-down on the side table. She didn’t look at me right away when I sat down in the chair across from her. The distance between the chair and the couch felt larger than the physical size of the room.“Start from the beginning,” she said. Her voice was quiet and exhausted and edged with something that hadn’t finished forming yet. “And don’t lie to me. Not about this. Not tonight.”I sat with my hands open on my knees and tried to find a place to begin that wouldn’t make everything worse the second the words left my mouth. There wasn’t one.“It started before the wedding,” I said. “Before he moved in. There was a night when you stepped out and we were alone. Something happened. I didn’t plan it. Neither did he. But it happened. And then it k

Chapter 55Derek’s POVA week after Marcus left, the apartment felt permanently altered. His absence showed up in small, ordinary places, the missing coffee mug on the second hook, the empty half of the closet shelf, the way Mom still reached for a third plate at dinner before catching herself and putting it back. I moved through the days like someone performing a version of my own life that no longer fit correctly in the frame.Campus became the only place that still felt somewhat normal, and even that was thin. I went to lectures, sat in the same seats, and took notes that made no sense when I read them later. The research project sat in my laptop like work that belonged to a different person, someone whose biggest problem had been a deadline instead of the wreckage currently living in my mother’s eyes every time she looked at me across the kitchen.Alex found me outside the library on the

Chapter 57Derek’s POVThe days that followed the conversation outside the building settled into a fragile new pattern that still didn’t feel like solid ground. Marcus did not move back into the apartment. He came by only when Mom allowed it, and even then he stayed in the spaces she designated, never lingering in the hallway near her door, never treating the place like it was still partly his. The three of us sat at the kitchen table twice that week and talked in careful, incomplete pieces about trust and damage and what, if anything, could be rebuilt from the wreckage the photo had left behind.Mom made it clear in those conversations that the marriage was not automatically over, but it was also no longer the same thing it had been before she saw the image on her phone. She needed time. She needed honesty without the careful packaging Marcus had used in the beginning. She needed both of us to stop deciding what she could and could not handle in the name of protecting her.“I do

Chapter 59Derek’s POVMarcus didn’t answer his phone the next morning.I texted at eight. Then at nine. Then at ten-thirty. Each message went through and sat there unread. By noon the fear that had been sitting in my chest since the night before had turned sharp and constant, a low-grade alarm that made it hard to focus on anything else. I tried the research project. I tried a walk around the block. I tried sitting on the couch with the television on mute. Nothing held. The phone stayed dark in my hand except for the ordinary notifications that weren’t his name.Mom found me in the living room in the middle of the afternoon, pacing the same short path between the couch and the window. She watched me for a few seconds from the hallway before she spoke.“Still nothing?”“No.”She came the rest of the way into the room and sat on the arm of the chair. Her clinic badge was still clipped to her pocket. She had come home between shifts instead of staying at work, and the fact of tha