All Chapters of PINNED BY MY STEPFATHER (MxM): Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

Chapter 61Derek’s POVThe fragile pattern we had been living in held for another week before it started to crack in places that had nothing to do with Mom or Marcus.Alex noticed first. We had agreed to meet in the library on a Wednesday afternoon to finish the last section of the research presentation. I told myself I would leave campus right after my morning lecture. Instead I sat on a bench near the quad with my phone in my hand and the same heavy fog that had been sitting behind my eyes for days. By the time I finally stood up I was already twenty minutes late. When I reached the library table we always used, Alex was packing up his laptop.He didn’t look angry. He looked tired in a way that made the guilt sit heavier in my chest.“I waited,” he said. He zipped the laptop into its sleeve with careful, deliberate motions. “You didn’t text. You didn’t answer the two messages I sent asking if you were still coming. I sat here thinking maybe you’d gotten held up or something happ

Chapter 64Derek’s POVMonday’s presentation went fine on the surface. Alex and I stood at the front of the seminar room under the hard fluorescent lights, clicked through the slides we had finished in near silence the day before, answered the professor’s questions with the right amount of detail, and sat down to the usual polite applause. No one in the room knew that the two people presenting had barely spoken outside of necessary project talk for over a week. No one knew that the clean bullet points and the practiced transitions were the last solid thing left between us. The professor nodded, made a short note on her pad, and moved on to the next pair. Ordinary. Successful. Finished.After class the room emptied in the usual shuffle of bags and chairs. Alex packed his laptop without looking at me. He zipped the sleeve, coiled the charger, and slid the notebook on top with the same deliberate

Chapter 66Derek’s POVThe morning after the night on the floor did not feel like a recovery. It felt like the first day of having to stand up while everything still hurt.I woke to gray light pushing through the blinds and the dull ache of having slept in short, useless pieces. For a few minutes I stayed still, staring at the ceiling, taking inventory. The rock-bottom feeling was still under me. The friendships were still damaged. The path with Mom and Marcus was still unclear. But the memory of her sitting on the carpet beside me, and the two words I had managed to send Marcus, sat in my chest like a thin crack that had let a little air in overnight.Mom was already in the kitchen when I came out. Coffee was made. The ordinary smell of it filled the space the way it always had. She pushed a mug toward me without asking and sat at the table with her own, hands wrapped around the ceramic. We didn’t talk a

Chapter 68Derek’s POVThe first time Marcus came back into the apartment since the night of the photo, it was because Mom asked him to.She set the boundary clearly beforehand, standing in the kitchen with her arms crossed and her voice steady in the way it got when she had already decided something and was not interested in negotiating the edges. He would come for one conversation at the kitchen table. He would leave when she said the conversation was over. There would be no overnight stays, no assumptions, no sliding back into the old patterns as if the damage hadn’t happened and the photo hadn’t sat between us like a live wire.“I’m not ready for him to live here again,” she said to me the morning she made the decision. “I may never be ready for that version of things. But I’m also not willing to keep having the most important conversations of my life through you li

Chapter 70Derek’s POVIt happened on a night when Mom was working a late shift at the clinic and had told both of us, clearly and without drama, that she would be gone until morning. She said it at the kitchen table while finishing a cup of coffee before she left, her voice steady, the boundary implied rather than spelled out. The apartment would be empty. What we did with that emptiness was left to us. She didn’t ask questions. She didn’t give permission in so many words. She simply stated the fact of her schedule and picked up her bag.Marcus came over an hour after she left. I met him at the door. For a moment we just stood there in the entryway looking at each other, the weight of every careful conversation and every park-bench restraint sitting between us. Then I stepped aside and he came in. We sat at the kitchen table first, the same table where the three of us had finally said the har