Filed to story: Addicted To My Hockey Stepbrother
***
I woke up at 3 AM.
His arm was around my waist. Heavy. Possessive even in sleep. My back against his chest, his face in my hair, our legs tangled together like they’d been doing this for years instead of hours.
The gravity of it hit me all at once.
My mother’s boyfriend’s son. My stepbrother-to-be. The man whose father was going to marry my mother. I could still feel him – between my thighs, on my skin, in the bruise his mouth had refreshed on my collarbone. Every rule I’d written was crumpled somewhere on his kitchen table and I was lying in his bed and I didn’t want to leave.
That was the scariest part. Not what we’d done – but how right it felt. How much I wanted to stay.
I picked my phone up from the nightstand with the arm he wasn’t holding hostage and saw a text notification.
Mom: Richard and I were thinking – wouldn’t it be lovely if you and Rhys carpooled to school together? You’re practically family now! 💕
I stared at the text. Then at the ceiling. Then at the arm around my waist – tattooed, bruised, warm.
Practically family.
I was so fucked.
I left at 5 AM like a coward.
No note. No kiss on his forehead. No romantic morning-after moment where I make coffee in his shirt and we smile at each other across the kitchen like people who haven’t just detonated their entire lives.
I simply peeled myself out from under his arm one inch at a time – holding my breath when he stirred, freezing when he mumbled something into the pillow that sounded dangerously close to my name – and grabbed my shoes from the hallway floor and my bag from the kitchen table and slipped out the door like I was fleeing a crime scene.
Which, technically, I was. The crime was sleeping with my future stepbrother in his bed, sober, on purpose, and liking it so much that I’d stayed the night instead of doing the smart thing and leaving while I still had plausible deniability.
The walk home was freezing. February had no sympathy for girls doing the walk of shame at dawn, and every step was a replay I didn’t ask for. His mouth on my stomach. His fingers threaded through mine above my head. The way he’d said my name – not Nomes, not Ellis, Naomi – like it was the only word worth learning.
My stepbrother.
I walked faster.
***
I avoided him all day. And I don’t mean casually – I mean I restructured my entire existence around not being in the same zip code as Rhys Maddox. Different routes to class. Lunch eaten in a bathroom stall, which was a new personal low even for me – granola bar on a toilet seat like a fugitive with a meal plan.
I also hid in the library basement behind the Russian literature section, because nobody voluntarily went near Dostoevsky and I needed that energy.
My phone buzzed at 11:14.
Unknown: Running?
One word. He didn’t need more than that. The accuracy alone could’ve killed me – because yes, that’s exactly what I was doing, and we both knew it, and he wasn’t even going to give me the courtesy of pretending otherwise.
I didn’t reply. Put my phone face-down. Stared at Dostoevsky until the words blurred into soup.
The thing about avoiding one boy is that it leaves you wide open for the other one. I should’ve known Caleb would find the gap.
Three PM. Campus coffee shop. I’d made the mistake of surfacing for caffeine, and I was standing at the pickup counter when an iced vanilla latte appeared in front of me – extra shot, light ice. My exact order. The one I’d been making since freshman year.
“Thought you could use this.”
Caleb. Warm smile. Concerned eyes. His own coffee in hand, positioned casually, like he’d just happened to be here at the same time I was. Which was a coincidence in the way a shark turning up where you’re swimming is a coincidence.
“Thanks,” I said. Carefully.
“Haven’t seen you around. You seem off.”
“Just busy.”
“Miles keeps asking about you.” Light. Easy. The verbal equivalent of a hand on my elbow steering me back toward him. “He wants to hang out this weekend. Told him I’d check.”
Miles. My thirteen-year-old brother who adored Caleb. Who wore his spare jersey to bed and begged to go to every game and didn’t understand why his sister had stopped coming around. Caleb knew exactly what invoking Miles did to me – a door he could always walk through, a soft spot he could always press.
“I’ll text Miles myself,” I said.
“Just the messenger.” Hands up. Innocent smile. “He misses you.”
The niceness was worse than the cruelty. At least when Caleb was cruel I could hate him cleanly. The nice version was harder because it wore the face of the boy who’d held my hand at my father’s remembrance and taught Miles to skate better and had been the first person I called about everything for four years. The nice version made me question all of it – whether I’d imagined the cruelty, whether I was the unreasonable one, whether suffocating and too soft were just things drunk boys said and I was building a grudge out of nothing.
I wasn’t wrong. But the doubt was the point. That’s what made Caleb dangerous – not what he did, but how he made you wonder whether it happened at all.
Sienna was waiting when I got back to our room, cross-legged on her bed with pre-med flashcards and the expression of a woman who was not going to be redirected.
“You’ve been weird for three days. You’re dodging me. You’re eating lunch alone. You came home at five AM smelling like men’s soap and didn’t say a single word.” She set down her flashcards. “What is going on?”
I opened my mouth. Closed it.
What would I even say? I slept with my future stepbrother. Sober. On purpose. In his bed. And it was the best night of my life and I’m terrified because I can still feel him everywhere and my mother wants us to carpool to school together like we’re siblings and not whatever the hell we actually are.
