Filed to story: Addicted To My Hockey Stepbrother
I walked home in the fading light feeling like I’d swallowed something whole – something warm and sharp and alive that was rearranging my insides to make room for itself.
***
I couldn’t sleep.
Sat in bed with my laptop glowing and the cursor blinking and all of it – Elena, the porch, the driveway, Christmas morning, the boy who waited – pressing against the inside of my chest demanding to be let out.
I opened the blank document from the other night. The one I hadn’t saved. Started a new one instead.
This time I didn’t write about myself. I wrote about him – not by name, not with details anyone could trace. Just the feeling of it. What it’s like to love someone whose skin tells stories their mouth won’t. What it’s like to trace a date on someone’s ribs and watch their whole body tighten around the memory. What it’s like to lie in the dark with a boy who’s spent his whole life expecting people to leave and choosing to stay anyway.
I wrote it fast. Didn’t edit. Didn’t second-guess. Just let it pour out messy and raw and honest in the way that only midnight writing can be.
I read it back once. It was the most truthful thing I’d ever written.
I hit publish before I could change my mind. Anonymous. No name. Just a blog post on a free platform that nobody would probably ever read, thrown into the void like a message in a bottle.
It felt like breathing.
I closed my laptop and sat in the dark, still buzzing with the feeling of having said something real – the quiet, electric aftermath of honesty. My body still warm from his bed. My mind still full of constellations and empty driveways and the sound of his voice saying you’re the first person I’ve told.
My phone lit up on the nightstand.
Mom: SWEETHEART! Richard and I set a date!! Wedding is September!! And we want you and Rhys in the wedding party – bridesmaid and groomsman!! Walking down the aisle together! Isn’t that WONDERFUL?? 💕💒✨
I stared at the text. Then at the ceiling. Then at my hands – the same hands that had traced tattoos on his ribs an hour ago, that had held his face while he told me about the worst day of his life, that had published a love letter to the internet about a boy I was supposed to call brother in less than a year.
September.
This wasn’t a semester fling. This wasn’t a deal that would expire when the tutoring ended or the fake dating ran its course. Richard and Mom were getting married. Legally. Permanently. And Rhys Maddox – the stranger from the bar, the boy in the bed, the man whose body I’d memorized and whose pain I’d just written about for the entire internet – was going to be my stepbrother.
Not temporarily. Not on paper. Permanently.
I put my phone face-down and stared at the dark ceiling of my dorm room and thought: Don’t.
It was way too late for that.
Caleb noticed.
I don’t know exactly when – maybe it was the way I stopped flinching when Rhys touched me in public, or the way my laugh around him had shifted from performative to real, or maybe Caleb just had a predator’s instinct for knowing when something he considered his was slipping further out of reach. But he noticed.
He found me between classes. Fell into step beside me like it was still something we did, like the last month hadn’t happened, like we were still the version of us that walked together everywhere.
“Can I ask you something?” Casual. Light. The tone of a friend making conversation.
“Sure.”
“You’re not actually taking Maddox seriously, right?”
I kept walking. Didn’t look at him.
“I mean – he’s fine. Whatever. But you know what he is. He’s a transfer with a violent history and a bad attitude and he’s been here five minutes.” He laughed. Short. Friendly. The kind of laugh designed to make the thing he was saying sound reasonable instead of calculated. “I just don’t want you to get hurt again. You deserve someone who’s actually good for you.”
Again. Like the last person who hurt me wasn’t him. Like Valentine’s night had been a natural disaster instead of something he did with his own mouth in his own kitchen.
“I appreciate the concern,” I said. Flat. Giving him nothing.
But the words stayed. That was the thing about Caleb – he didn’t need you to agree. He just needed to plant the seed and walk away and let your own anxiety do the watering. You’re not actually taking him seriously, right? Sitting in my head like a splinter. Making me wonder if the shift Caleb had noticed was something everyone could see, and if everyone could see it, then how long before it reached My mom, Richard, the entire campus.
How long before September became a problem with witnesses.
The Miles campaign also started that week.
Caleb showed up to Miles’s youth league practice on Tuesday. Not just showed up – brought gear. A new stick, tape, a bag of pucks. Miles called me that night practically vibrating through the phone.
“Caleb brought me a real composite stick! Like the ones the team uses! And he stayed for the whole practice and taught me edge work and Coach said I was the best skater on the ice today!”
“That’s amazing, buddy.”
“Can Caleb come to my game on Saturday? He said he would if you’re okay with it.”
If you’re okay with it. Asking my permission through a thirteen-year-old. Making me the gatekeeper so that if I said no, I was the one ruining Miles’s happiness. If I said yes, the leash tightened another notch.
“Of course he can come.”
Thursday: Caleb at Miles’s game. Sitting in the stands like a proud older brother, cheering, high-fiving Miles after every shift. Mom noticed. “It’s so sweet that Caleb’s taken Miles under his wing. That boy really does care about your family.”
Friday: Miles wearing the new stick to school. Telling his friends about his hockey mentor. Caleb’s name woven into my little brother’s life like thread – one strand at a time, so slowly you didn’t notice until the whole fabric depended on it.
Zara was the only one who saw it.
“He’s building a leash,” she said. We were in her car after a coffee run, and she said it the way Zara said everything – direct, no cushion, truth first and feelings second. “Think about it. If Miles loves him, you can never fully cut him off. Every time you try to distance yourself, Caleb shows up at your brother’s practice with a new stick and a smile and suddenly you’re the villain for pulling away.”
