Filed to story: Addicted To My Hockey Stepbrother
I wrote at night, after Sienna fell asleep, the screen glow turning my dorm room blue. Anonymous posts about wanting things that could burn your life down. About kissing someone whose last name you might share someday. About tracing tattoos in the dark and learning someone’s history through their skin because their mouth wouldn’t give it to you. I never used names. Never used details specific enough to trace. Just the raw, bleeding centre of what it felt like to be falling for someone I was supposed to call family.
People were reading. Not a lot – not viral, not famous – but enough. A hundred followers became three hundred. Comments started appearing – women who recognized something in the words, who said this feels like my story and how do you know exactly what this is like. I read every single one and felt less alone each time.
Rhys found the blog on a Tuesday.
We were in his apartment. Post-tutoring, post-dinner, that golden hour where the deal blurred into something domestic and terrifying. He was on his phone while I graded his essay draft. Scrolling something. Then he stopped.
“Read this.”
He held his phone out to me. My own words stared back – last Thursday’s post, the one about lying in bed next to someone whose breathing you’ve memorized and wondering if this is what peace feels like or just the calm before the next disaster.
“Found it on some blog. Anonymous. No idea who writes it.” He was looking at me with an expression I’d never seen on him – open, almost soft. “It’s like someone crawled inside my head and wrote down everything I can’t say.”
I looked at my own words on his screen and the irony was so devastating I almost laughed. Almost cried. Almost told him everything right there on his couch.
“It’s good,” I said. Steady voice. Trembling hands hidden under the essay. “Really good.”
“Whoever’s writing it – they get it. The wanting-something-that-could-wreck-you thing. The reaching anyway.” He took his phone back. “I’ve read everything they’ve posted. Three times.”
I excused myself to the bathroom and sat on the edge of his tub and pressed my hands over my mouth and breathed through the feeling of being seen by someone who didn’t know he was seeing you.
Campus had also fully committed to the narrative. Rhys and Naomi. The transfer and the girl. We were a story people told – in group chats, in dining halls, in the confessions page comments where strangers debated whether we were hot or messy or both.
Caleb, however, was quiet.
That was worse than anything he’d done so far. Worse than the texts, the coffee shop ambushes, the Miles campaign. Silence from Caleb Park meant recalculation. It meant he was standing back, watching, adjusting his strategy.
“When Caleb goes silent, he’s planning,” Zara said. Matter of fact. The way she’d say it’s going to rain – not worried, just informed. “Watch your back.”
Sienna was suspicious for different reasons. She’d been circling the truth for weeks now – noting the nights I came home late, the soap that wasn’t mine, the way I looked when I said Rhys’s name versus the way I looked when I said my tutor.
“I’m going to ask you something,” she said one night. Cross-legged on her bed. Pre-med flashcards abandoned. “And I need you to know that whatever the answer is, I love you.”
My heart rate spiked. “Okay.”
“If you tell me you’re sleeping with your stepbrother, I need twenty minutes to process before I support you unconditionally.”
I laughed. Too hard. Too fast. The kind of laugh that was one degree away from confession and she knew it and I knew she knew it and we both let it hang there.
“He’s not my stepbrother yet,” I said. Which wasn’t a denial.
“That’s not a no, Naomi.”
“It’s not a yes either. Can we talk about something else?”
She let it go. But her eyes said I already know and I’m waiting for you to be ready.
***
The photo arrived on a Wednesday.
I didn’t see it happen. Didn’t know it existed until Caleb materialized beside me outside the science building with his phone held up like evidence at a trial.
“Explain this.”
The photo was us. Outside the rink after last week’s game – his hand on my lower back, my face turned up to his, completely unguarded. No performance. No awareness of an audience. Just two people looking at each other the way people look at each other when they’ve forgotten anyone else exists.
It didn’t look fake. It didn’t look like a deal. It looked like exactly what it was.
“Where did you get this?” I asked. Calm. Controlled. Even though my pulse was jackhammering.
“Does it matter? Look at it, Naomi. Look at your face. That’s not for show.” His voice was tight. Not angry – something rawer. “That’s real. You’re actually-“
“Mind your business, Caleb.”
“You ARE my business.”
“No. I’m not. I haven’t been your business since Valentine’s Day.” I stepped back. Steady. Firm. “And maybe instead of stalking me, you should focus on the person who sent you that photo. Because whoever’s taking pictures of me and sending them to my ex-best-friend has their own agenda and you’re too busy being jealous to see it.”
His jaw tightened. The golden-boy mask flickered – just for a second, just enough for me to see the thing underneath. Not concern. Not protection. Possession. Pure, uncut, four-years-in-the-making possession.
“Jade sent it,” he said. Quiet. Testing.
“Then deal with Jade.”
We stared at each other. The space between us vibrated with four years of history – every playlist I’d made, every game I’d attended, every letter he’d let them read, every suffocating and too soft and I’d break her. All of it compressed into three feet of sidewalk and two people who used to be everything to each other and were now something neither of us had a word for.
“This isn’t over,” he said.
“For me it is.”
I walked away. Felt his eyes on my back. Felt the weight of the photo – evidence of something real, floating around campus in Jade’s phone and now in Caleb’s hands, a weapon waiting to be aimed.
