Filed to story: Addicted To My Hockey Stepbrother
“She actually wrote ‘you make the world feel less loud.’ What does that even mean?”
“It means she’s down bad, bro. Catastrophically.”
I stopped breathing.
Caleb didn’t stop them. Didn’t say that’s enough or give it back. He just let them read, let them laugh, let them hold every private thing I’d ever felt up to the light and turn it into entertainment.
Then his voice. Not laughing – but not defending either. Tired. Almost annoyed. Like I was a problem he’d been tolerating.
“She’s suffocating. I’ve tried to give her space to grow up but she doesn’t get the message. She’s too soft for real life.”
Suffocating. Too soft.
The words landed on my chest and pressed down.
A teammate – I couldn’t tell which one, they all sounded the same when they were drunk and cruel – said something crude. Something about my body. Something that made the rest of them laugh in that low, ugly way.
Caleb’s response came fast. Casual. Like he’d thought about it before and already had the answer loaded.
“Nah. I’d break her.”
I sat there on the steps and let every word sink in like stones into water.
Suffocating. Too soft. I’d break her.
Four years. Four years of sitting in stands screaming his name. Four years of making him playlists and remembering his allergies and dropping everything when he called. Four years of being the girl who was always there, always steady, always waiting for him to turn around and see me.
And he saw me. He’d always seen me. He just didn’t want what he saw.
Something inside me shifted. Not broke – I’d expected breaking. This was different. Quieter. Harder. Like a door I didn’t know I had, closing. A lock I didn’t know existed, clicking shut.
I stopped crying.
I wiped my face with the back of my hand, smearing mascara across my knuckles. I looked at it for a second. Then I stood up.
I didn’t go back inside. Didn’t collect the scrapbook. Didn’t text Sienna or call Zara or do any of the things the old Naomi would have done.
I walked.
Heels clicking on cold pavement. Arms bare. February wind cutting through the dress like it wasn’t there. I didn’t know where I was going until I was already there – a bar three blocks off campus that I’d never been to, with a neon sign buzzing in the window and a door that was heavier than it looked.
I sat down at the bar. Ordered a vodka cranberry because it was the only cocktail I knew by name. The bartender didn’t card me. I looked old enough tonight. Grief aged you.
The drink came. I wrapped both hands around the glass and stared at it like it had the answers. The bar was half-empty – a Tuesday night, Valentine’s Day, the kind of place where people came to avoid exactly the holiday I’d just been destroyed by.
I took a sip. It was too sweet and too strong and I didn’t care.
I was halfway through the glass when a hand slid another drink in front of me. Darker. Amber. Something that smelled like it could strip paint.
“You look like you’re about to either cry or kill someone.”
The voice was low. Unhurried. The kind of voice that didn’t ask for your attention – it just took it.
“Either way, you need something stronger than that.”
I looked up.
Steel grey eyes. The kind of grey that wasn’t soft – wasn’t misty or gentle or any of the words people used to make grey sound pretty. This grey was a knife edge. A frozen lake. The color of something that could cut you if you touched it wrong.
A scar split through his left eyebrow – thin, pale, deliberate-looking, like someone had tried to mark him and he’d worn it like a dare ever since. Dark hair falling over his forehead. A bruise on his cheekbone, fresh, turning purple at the edges. His knuckles on the bar top were split and swollen.
He was the most dangerously beautiful person I had ever seen in my life.
And he was looking at me like he already knew exactly what had happened tonight – not the details, but the shape of it. The wreckage. Like he recognized it.
I should have looked away. Should have said no thanks and gone back to my sad vodka cranberry and my shattered pride and my mascara-streaked face.
But the old Naomi – the soft one, the suffocating one, the one who was too much and never enough – she was sitting on the steps of a hockey house three blocks away. And whoever was left in this chair had nothing to lose.
I looked at the drink he’d set in front of me. Looked back at those steel grey eyes.
“Which one do you think?” I asked. “Crying or killing?”
He didn’t smile. But something in his expression shifted – a flicker of interest, sharp and immediate, like I’d said the first interesting thing he’d heard all night.
“Guess I’ll stay and find out.”
He didn’t sit down.
He’d slid the drink in front of me and stayed standing, one elbow on the bar, angled toward me like I had to earn him staying. Up close he was worse – worse meaning better meaning dangerous.
The bruise on his cheekbone was fresh, turning purple at the edges. The scar through his eyebrow was older. Tattoos crept up the side of his neck, disappearing into his collar – the kind you got one at a time over years, not all at once in a parlor on spring break. His knuckles on the bar top were split and swollen. Everything about him looked like a warning label that someone had ripped off and eaten.
