Filed to story: Addicted To My Hockey Stepbrother
“Boy stuff,” I said.
“Which boy?”
“All of them. None of them. I’m handling it.”
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she nodded – not because she believed me, but because she loved me enough to let me lie until I was ready for the truth.
“When you’re done handling it,” she said, “I’m here.”
That night I couldn’t sleep. Sat in bed with my laptop glowing in the dark and a cursor blinking on a blank document like it was waiting for me to confess.
I typed:
What does it feel like to want something you know will destroy you?
It feels like reaching for a green light across the water. It feels like building a cathedral for someone who lives in a shed. It feels like walking into a bar alone on Valentine’s Day and finding the most dangerous person in the room and choosing him anyway.
It feels like his hands. His mouth. His voice saying your name like it’s the only word worth knowing.
It feels like waking up in his bed and knowing you should run and knowing you’ll go back.
I didn’t publish it. Didn’t save it. Just bled onto the page and closed the laptop and sat in the dark with the echo of my own honesty ringing in my ears.
My phone lit up. Midnight.
Unknown: You left without waking me. That’s twice now. Room 3B. Lunch. Don’t make me come find you.
I stared at the text. Then I opened his contact – the blank space where a name should be. My thumb hovered. Rhys was too familiar. Maddox was too distant. Stepbrother was too horrifying. Run was too honest.
I typed four letters and a period.
Don’t.
Saved it. Put my phone down. Pulled the covers up and reached for a book, any book, anything to crowd him out of my head.
It didn’t work. Nothing worked.
Don’t.
I was already terrible at following my own advice.
I went to lunch with Sienna and Zara specifically because I thought he wouldn’t find me in a crowd.
Stupid. Stupid to think a cafeteria full of people would stop Rhys Maddox from doing exactly what he wanted. Stupid to think I could hide from a man who’d already proven he could find me in a bar, at a dinner table, and in my own bloodstream.
He appeared at 12:47. Tray in one hand, dropping into the chair beside me like he’d been sitting there his whole life. Sienna’s fork froze halfway to her mouth. Zara’s eyebrows disappeared into her hairline.
“Ladies,” he said. Casual. Easy. Like this was routine.
Then he reached across and stole a fry off my plate.
“Did you just-“
He took another one.
“Those are my-“
“You weren’t eating them. You were rearranging them.” He looked at Sienna. Then Zara. Devastating smile – the real one, the rare one, deployed with surgical precision. “I’m Rhys.”
“We know,” Sienna said. “Everyone knows.”
“Good things, I hope.”
“Terrifying things, mostly. Four goals. One fight. Campus is split on whether you’re a hockey god or a psychopath.”
“Can’t be both?”
Zara laughed. Sienna looked at me with an expression that said I understand everything now and you’re telling me later.
Rhys leaned in. His mouth close to my ear. To everyone watching – and people were watching, phones angled, whispers already spreading – it looked like a boyfriend whispering something sweet. It wasn’t.
“You’ve been avoiding me for two days. If you don’t follow me to the library in the next sixty seconds, I’m going to say something in front of your friends that you’re really not going to want them to hear.”
He pulled back. Smiled at me. Sweet. Devastating. Completely psychotic.
“I need to borrow your girlfriend for a bit,” he told Sienna and Zara. “Tutoring emergency.”
“She’s not our girlfriend,” Zara said. “But sure.”
I stood up. Grabbed my bag. Gave my friends a look that said I will explain later even though I had absolutely no explanation that wouldn’t make everything worse.
We made it to the library’s private study room – 3B, our room, the one where I’d written rules on the back of a form and he’d signed them with a smirk – before I turned on him.
