Filed to story: Addicted To My Hockey Stepbrother
“He’s being nice to a kid. I can’t exactly-“
“You can’t prove it. That’s the point. That’s why it works.” She looked at me. “Caleb isn’t stupid. He’s patient. And he’s playing a longer game than you’re giving him credit for.”
I didn’t argue. I couldn’t. Because she was right and I knew she was right and the helplessness of knowing someone is manipulating you but not being able to prove it without sounding crazy was its own special kind of torture.
***
I kept the next tutoring session strictly professional.
Room 3B. Books open. Notes spread out. I sat on my side of the table. He sat on his. No touching. No accidental thigh contact. No loaded eye contact over Fitzgerald.
Rhys noticed immediately.
He didn’t say anything for the first twenty minutes. Just worked through the essay outline I’d given him – quietly, methodically, his pen moving across the paper while I corrected grammar and pretended the six inches of space between our elbows wasn’t screaming at me.
“The thesis needs to be more specific,” I said. “You’re arguing that Gatsby’s obsession is self-destructive but you’re not grounding it in textual evidence. Find the passage where-“
“You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“Building walls.” He didn’t look up from his paper. Kept writing. “You get close. Then you get scared. Then you put a table between us and talk about thesis statements like that’s going to fix whatever’s happening in your head.”
“I’m being professional.”
“You’re being distant. There’s a difference.”
“Maybe distance is what we need right now.”
He kept writing. Didn’t push. Didn’t reach across the table or make a joke or do any of the things I half-wanted him to do because at least then I’d have something to push against. The restraint was worse than pursuit. The silence was louder than any argument.
We worked for another hour. Clean. Professional. Agonizing. Every time his hand moved across the page I watched his knuckles – still scarred, still bruised – and thought about those same hands on my skin two nights ago and wanted to scream.
At the end of the session, he packed up his books. Slowly. Deliberately. Then he looked at me.
“You’re scared.”
“I’m being smart.”
“No.” He slung his bag over his shoulder. Those grey eyes steady, seeing everything I was trying to hide. “You’re being safe. There’s a difference.”
He left. Door clicking shut behind him. No drama. No argument. Just the quiet devastation of someone telling you the truth you’ve been avoiding and walking away to let you sit with it.
I sat in the empty library room for a long time after.
He was right. I wasn’t being smart. Smart would be evaluating the situation and making a decision. I was being safe – retreating, withdrawing, building walls out of thesis statements and professional distance because the alternative was admitting that what I felt for Rhys Maddox had outgrown every container I’d built for it.
Safe meant nothing could hurt me.
Safe also meant nothing could reach me.
And the thing about that – the thing I was only just starting to understand – was that those were the same thing.
I wore his name on my back.
Not planned. Not discussed. I showed up at the arena and Sienna handed me a jersey – black, oversized, MADDOX printed across the shoulders in white block letters, number seventeen beneath it. “Before you argue,” she said, “it’s too late. I already bought it.”
I put it on. It smelled like new fabric and bad decisions and it fell to the middle of my thighs and the second I caught my reflection in the arena glass, I knew there was no coming back from this.
Everyone noticed.
Zara grinned. Sienna took a photo. Three girls in the row behind me whispered loud enough for me to hear – she’s wearing his jersey, it’s official, Caleb must be losing his mind. I didn’t look for Caleb. Didn’t need to. I could feel his attention from across the arena like heat from an open flame.
The game was a rivalry match – Thornfield versus Redmond, Rhys’s old school, which meant the energy in the building was unhinged before the puck even dropped. Redmond’s fans had signs. Some were about hockey. Some were about Rhys. One said EXPELLED in red letters. He skated past it during warmups without looking.
But I saw his jaw tighten.
First period: controlled chaos. Rhys was everywhere – intercepting passes, driving the play, moving with that predatory fluidity that made the ice look like it had been built for him specifically. Caleb played well too, technically, but it was the difference between watching someone follow a recipe and watching someone cook by instinct. Rhys didn’t play hockey. He spoke it.
Second period: things got dirty. Redmond targeted him – hooks, slashes, cross-checks that the refs were conveniently slow to call. He took every hit and kept going, jaw set, eyes cold, channeling the pain into speed the way only someone who’d been turning pain into fuel his entire life knew how.
Third period. Four minutes left. Tied game.
Rhys carried the puck across the blue line and Redmond’s defenseman – six-four, two-twenty, built like a wall with skates – hit him so hard the sound echoed through the arena. Board-rattling. Bone-deep. The kind of hit that made the crowd gasp collectively, a thousand people inhaling at the same time.
He went down.
My hands flew to my mouth. Sienna grabbed my arm. The arena went quiet – that terrible, held-breath quiet that meant someone might not get up.
Get up. Get up. Get up.
He got up.
