Filed to story: Addicted To My Hockey Stepbrother
Rhys looked at the hand. Then at Caleb. Then he took it.
Squeezed.
I could see Caleb’s knuckles shift – the pressure enough to make a point without making a scene. Rhys’s expression didn’t change. Didn’t flinch. Just held the handshake and held Caleb’s gaze with those grey eyes and smiled the kind of smile that had nothing to do with friendliness.
“I know exactly who you are.”
Six words. No volume. No aggression. Just a quiet, absolute certainty that said I know what you did to her. I know what you are. And I’m not going anywhere.
Caleb’s smile didn’t waver. But his eyes went flat.
They released hands at the same time. Neither broke eye contact.
I stood between them and felt the air thicken – two fault lines pressing against each other, building pressure, waiting for the earthquake that was definitely, inevitably coming.
This was only the beginning.
Caleb avoided us for the rest of the mixer. Physically, at least – his eyes didn’t leave us once, tracking every movement like a predator calculating distance. But he didn’t approach again. Didn’t need to. The handshake had said everything both of them wanted to say, and the rest was just a matter of time.
Campus didn’t stop buzzing. Not that night. Not the next morning. Not during lectures where I could feel people’s eyes on the back of my head like sunburn. The confessions page had a new thread – Maddox and Ellis confirmed?? – with four hundred comments and a blurry photo someone had snapped of the temple kiss. Half the comments were fire emojis. The other half were calling me Caleb’s leftovers.
I was still thinking about the comments when Rhys’s hand landed on my thigh.
We’d been in study room 3B for over an hour. Laptops open. Gatsby notes spread between us. Professional. Boundaries intact. I’d been explaining the symbolism of the green light for the third time because he kept asking questions that I was starting to suspect had nothing to do with Fitzgerald and everything to do with watching my mouth move.
His hand sat just above my knee. Warm through my jeans. Still.
I kept talking. The green light represents the American Dream’s corruption, the-
His fingers moved. Two inches higher. Slow. Deliberate. Like he was testing how long I could keep my sentence going while his hand crept toward the place where my brain stopped working.
“The, um – the corruption of idealism through – Rhys.”
“I’m listening. Corruption of idealism.”
“Your hand.”
“What about it?”
“It’s on my thigh.”
“Is it?” He didn’t look down. Didn’t look at his hand. Looked directly at me with those grey eyes, innocent as a saint, while his fingers drew a lazy circle on my inner thigh that made my breath hitch. “Must’ve slipped.”
“It’s slipping higher.”
“Gravity.”
“That’s not how gravity works.”
His fingers moved again. I grabbed his hand. Pressed it flat against my leg. “Stop.”
He stopped. Immediately. Completely. No argument, no pushing, no testing – just stillness, his hand warm under mine, his eyes searching my face.
I didn’t let go.
That was the problem. My mouth said stop and my hand said stay exactly where you are and we both knew which one I meant. The silence stretched between us – thick, electric, the air in the study room suddenly too warm and too small.
“We should move,” I said.
“Where?”
“Anywhere that isn’t a glass-walled room where everyone can see us.”
The stacks in the back of the library’s third floor were deserted. Ancient literary criticism. Dusty spines nobody had touched since the nineties. The lighting was dim – one fluorescent tube flickering overhead like even the building knew something was about to happen and was trying to set the mood.
He kissed me first. Or I kissed him. Or we met somewhere in the middle – I honestly don’t know because one second we were standing between shelves of forgotten Faulkner analysis and the next my back was against the bookshelf and his mouth was on mine and my fingers were in his hair and rational thought had left the building.
This wasn’t the gentle kiss from his apartment. This was the bar bathroom energy – urgent, consuming, his tongue against mine and my teeth catching his lower lip and both of us making sounds that had no business existing in an academic institution. His hands found my waist, then my hips, then slid under my shirt and I arched into the contact so hard the bookshelf rattled.
“Quiet,” he breathed against my mouth. “We’re in a library.”
“Then stop making me-“
He rolled his hips against mine. Slow. Grinding into me through two layers of denim with a pressure that was devastating and nowhere near enough. My head fell back against the shelf. His mouth dropped to my neck – not gentle, not careful – biting the spot below my ear that made my spine dissolve.
My hands found the hem of his shirt. Pulled it up. My fingers traced the tattoos on his ribs – the ink I’d felt in the bar bathroom but never seen properly, dark lines and shading that told stories I still didn’t know. He shuddered when my nails dragged across the constellation on his forearm. Filed that away.
His hand slid higher under my shirt. Over my bra. Then under it – his thumb dragging across my nipple with a slowness that made me bite down on my own lip hard enough to taste copper. He did it again. Circled. Pinched gently. I whimpered and his other hand clamped over my mouth.
“I said quiet.” His eyes locked on mine. Dark. Wrecked. His hips still moving against me in that slow grind that was building something catastrophic. “You want to get us caught?”
I shook my head behind his hand. He kept it there – kept his palm pressed over my lips while his other hand worked my nipple and his hips rolled into mine and I was losing my mind, actually losing it. My fingers tangled in his hair and pulled and he groaned against my throat, low and broken, which was deeply unfair given that I was the one who was supposed to be quiet.
