Filed to story: Addicted To My Hockey Stepbrother
He was hard against me. I could feel every inch of him through his jeans and I pressed into it – shameless, desperate, grinding back against him while his hand covered my mouth and his thumb brushed my nipple and the bookshelf behind me creaked ominously.
“Fuck,” he whispered. “You keep moving like that and I’m going to-“
Footsteps.
We froze. His hand still over my mouth. My leg still hitched against his hip. Both of us breathing like we’d run a marathon.
Someone rounded the corner. A girl – headphones in, scanning the shelves, looking for a book that was probably three inches from my left shoulder. She didn’t look up. Grabbed a thick hardcover. Walked away.
We didn’t move until her footsteps faded completely.
He dropped his hand from my mouth. We stared at each other. His hair was wrecked – my fault. My shirt was untucked and my bra was pushed up and I could still feel the ghost of his thumb on my nipple.
“We need actual boundaries,” I said. Breathless. Unconvincing.
“You set them.” He was breathing just as hard. His hand was still under my shirt, resting against my ribs like he’d forgotten it was there. Or didn’t want to move it. “I’ll break them. That’s how this works.”
I hated that he was right. I hated that every rule I wrote turned into a dare he accepted. I hated that I was standing in a library with my shirt untucked and my body screaming for him and the only thing stopping me from dragging him back to his apartment was the thin, fraying thread of self-preservation I had left.
I fixed my shirt. He fixed his hair. We walked out of the stacks like two people who definitely hadn’t just been dry humping between the literary criticism shelves.
We made it four steps past the circulation desk.
“Tutoring session went late, huh?”
Caleb. Leaning against the library entrance. Arms crossed. Eyes moving from my flushed face to my hastily tucked shirt to Rhys standing behind me with his hair still messed up from my fingers.
My stomach dropped.
Rhys didn’t miss a beat. His arm went around my shoulder – easy, possessive – and he steered me past
Caleb without breaking stride.
“Fitzgerald’s a complicated guy,” he said. “Takes a while to get to the good parts.”
He kept walking. I kept walking. Caleb’s eyes burned into my back like a brand.
He wasn’t going to let this go. I could feel it – the way you feel a storm building before the sky changes. Caleb Park had spent four years keeping me in a box he could open whenever he wanted, and now someone else had picked the lock.
That wasn’t the kind of thing Caleb forgave.
Caleb started showing up everywhere.
Not obviously. Not in a way I could point to and say this is harassment, this is wrong, this is a man who can’t let go. He was smarter than that. He showed up the way water finds cracks – slowly, persistently, filling every gap I left unguarded until I couldn’t remember what dry felt like.
Tuesday: a text at 7 AM. Hey, just checking in. You seemed stressed yesterday. Wednesday: he was at my coffee shop. Different time than usual – my time, the slot I’d switched to specifically to avoid him. Coincidence. Thursday: a mutual friend mentioned Caleb had been asking about my schedule. “He’s worried about you,” she said, like worry was always a gift and never a weapon.
Friday: he volunteered to coach Miles’s youth hockey practice.
Miles called me about it, vibrating with excitement. “Caleb’s going to help with drills! He said he’d teach me the between-the-legs deke. Can you come watch?”
My thirteen-year-old brother. The softest, most unguarded part of my life. And Caleb had walked right in – not through me, but around me. Directly into the space where refusing him meant hurting Miles, and accepting him meant letting the leash tighten one more notch.
“That’s great, buddy,” I said. My voice steady. My hands shaking.
I told Rhys about it during our next tutoring session. Showed him the texts – the check-ins, the showing up, the Miles situation. He read them in silence, scrolling through the screen with his jaw tightening incrementally with each message.
“Let me handle it.”
“No.”
“One conversation. That’s all it would take.”
“Your version of a conversation put him into a wall last time.”
“And he’s still breathing. I showed restraint.” He set my phone down. Those grey eyes were hard – not at me, but at the situation. At the careful, calculated way Caleb was threading himself back into my life through every door I couldn’t lock. “He’s not checking on you. He’s surveilling you.”
“I know what he’s doing.”
“Then let me-“
“I said no, Rhys.” Firm. Final. Because the thing about Caleb was that he wanted a reaction. He wanted Rhys to swing, wanted me to scream, wanted evidence that he still had the power to make us lose control. The only thing that scared Caleb Park was being irrelevant. “The best thing we can do is nothing.”
He didn’t like it. I could see it in the way his knuckles went white around his pen, the way his jaw worked like he was physically chewing back words. But he nodded.
Progress.
***
The family brunch was Richard’s idea.
A restaurant with cloth napkins and a Sunday jazz trio and the specific kind of upper-middle-class warmth that made everything feel civilized even when it wasn’t. Mom in a new blouse. Richard in a pressed shirt. Miles inhaling pancakes like he hadn’t eaten in a week. And me, sitting across from Rhys Maddox, performing the role of polite future stepsister while his hand found my knee under the table within the first three minutes.
