Filed to story: Addicted To My Hockey Stepbrother
Zara was right. When Caleb went silent, he was planning.
And now he had ammunition.
“You’re staring at your phone again.”
Sienna didn’t look up from her flashcards. She didn’t need to – she had a sixth sense for when I was spiraling and an even sharper one for when the spiral involved a boy.
“I’m not staring. I’m reading.”
“You’re rereading a text from Rhys for the fourth time. That’s not reading. That’s forensic analysis.”
She wasn’t wrong. The text was three words – see you tomorrow – and I’d been trying to decode the emotional temperature of a period versus no period for eleven minutes. This was who I was now. A girl who analyzed punctuation from a boy who was technically almost her stepbrother.
Growth.
The thing about Rhys and me was that everyone on campus knew what we were except us. He walked me to class. Found me after every game, still damp from the ice, and slung his arm around my shoulder like a claim. When I shivered outside the arena one night he pulled his jacket off and put it on me without asking and without making it a moment – just did it, like keeping me warm was something his body did automatically now. And when Caleb was nearby, which was always, Rhys would look at him with an expression that said she’s right here and she’s not going anywhere and neither am I. A dare dressed as eye contact.
Publicly, we were airtight. Privately, we were a question mark. And I’d been circling that question mark for days – turning it over during lectures, in the shower, at 2 AM staring at the ceiling while Sienna slept. What are we doing? What is this? Are we together or are we just two people who keep ending up in each other’s beds and calling it complicated?
I brought it up after a tutoring session because there was never going to be a good moment and I was tired of waiting for one.
We were in 3B. Books closed. Essay submitted. That window between studying and leaving where the room always felt smaller and the professional distance we kept during tutoring dissolved into whatever we actually were. I could feel the question sitting in my chest like a stone, getting heavier with every second I didn’t say it.
“Can I ask you something?”
“You’re going to anyway.”
“What are we actually doing?”
He didn’t flinch. But his posture changed – a stillness that wasn’t relaxed. The kind of still that animals go when they hear a sound they don’t like.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean this. Us. The deal was fake dating. The tutoring is real. The sex is – very real. But we don’t have a word for what this is and I need one. Because right now I’m doing the thing I swore I’d never do again, which is arranging my entire emotional life around a boy who won’t tell me where I stand.”
I hated how my voice sounded. Too careful. Too rehearsed. Too much like the version of myself who used to practice what she’d say to Caleb in the mirror so the words would land perfectly and he’d finally see her. I thought I’d killed that girl on the porch steps of the hockey house. Turns out she’d just been waiting for someone new to perform for.
That was the uncomfortable truth I’d been avoiding – that maybe I wasn’t changing at all. Maybe I was just transferring. Same devotion, different jersey.
He ran a hand through his hair. Looked at the table, at the window, at anywhere that wasn’t me.
“Naomi.”
“Don’t say my name like that’s an answer.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Everything about us is complicated. That’s not new information. I’m asking what you want.”
He looked at me then. And his expression cracked – just for a second, just long enough for me to see the thing underneath the composure. Not indifference. Fear. The kind of fear that comes from wanting something so badly you’d rather leave it unnamed than risk it becoming something you could lose.
I recognized it because I’d worn it for four years with Caleb. The difference was that recognizing it didn’t make it hurt less.
He leaned forward. Took my face in both hands. Kissed me – slow, deep, the kind of kiss designed to make you forget what you were saying. And it almost worked. His mouth was warm and his hands were steady and my brain started doing that thing where rational thought dissolved into static and want.
I pulled back. “That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I have right now.”
The honesty hurt worse than a lie would have. A lie I could fight. Right now just meant wait – and I’d spent four years waiting for Caleb Park to figure out what he wanted and I swore on the steps of that hockey house that I’d never do it again.
But pushing Rhys when he wasn’t ready was like pushing a wall. You just hurt your own hands.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay?”
“For now.”
He held my gaze. Then nodded. And I left the library with the question still floating between us and a bruise somewhere inside my chest that I couldn’t butterfly-bandage closed.
That night I wrote. Not about him directly – never directly. But the post came out raw and fast and angry in a way the others hadn’t been. About being someone’s secret. About the difference between being hidden and being held. About wanting someone who would choose you out loud, in daylight, with their whole chest – and settling for the dark because at least in the dark you could pretend the silence was intimacy instead of avoidance.
I published it at 1 AM. By morning it had two thousand shares.
The comments were a flood – college girls tagging their friends, writing paragraphs in the replies about boys who kissed them behind closed doors and acted like acquaintances in public. This is my life right now. Who IS this writer? I feel so seen. The post was everywhere – reposted on Twitter, screenshotted on Instagram, quoted on campus confession pages I didn’t even know existed.
My anonymous blog wasn’t anonymous-small anymore. It was anonymous-viral. And every word of it was about a boy whose last name I might legally share by September.
Caleb, meanwhile, continued his campaign of strategic omnipresence. Study group I’d joined for midterms – he appeared with notes and a helpful smile. Miles’s Saturday practice – he was there with new drills and protein bars. Campus coffee shop, Tuesday afternoon, my usual corner – there he was, laptop open, like he’d been planted there for hours. Never threatening. Never aggressive. Just present. A constant reminder that he was woven into every corner of my life, and cutting him out completely would mean cutting out pieces of myself.
I saw him through the coffee shop window once, Jade sitting across from him, her legs crossed, her phone in her hand. He was scrolling through something on his screen – my Instagram, probably, or Rhys’s – and Jade’s jaw tightened every few seconds. A micro-expression most people wouldn’t catch, but I’d grown up with Jade. I knew that jaw. That was jealousy wearing patience like a costume, and Jade Ellis didn’t store things up for nothing. Whatever she was filing away, she’d use eventually.
I filed it away too.
Last class of the day. Bag on my shoulder, earbuds in, head full of blog comments and undefined relationships and Caleb’s shadow in every coffee shop I walked into.
I stepped into the parking lot and stopped.
Rhys was leaning against his motorcycle. Helmet in one hand, hair pushed back, leather jacket on – the late afternoon light catching the tattoos on his wrist and turning them gold. He looked like the answer to a question I hadn’t figured out how to ask yet.
He held out the second helmet.
“Get on.”
I’d never been on a motorcycle before.
He didn’t ask if I was scared. Just handed me the helmet, waited for me to put it on, and swung his leg over the bike like he’d been born on one. The engine rumbled to life between his thighs – low, deep, a vibration I felt in my teeth before I even climbed on.
“Hold on to me,” he said. Not a suggestion.
My arms went around his waist. My chest pressed flat against his back and my thighs locked against his hips and I could feel everything – the leather of his jacket under my fingers, the warmth of his body underneath, the hard lines of his stomach through his shirt. The tattoos I’d memorized with my mouth were inches from my hands.
He pulled out of the lot and I held on so tight my knuckles went white.
Thirty seconds of pure terror. The wind hitting my face, the ground blurring, the world tilting on turns that felt like falling. Then something shifted – not in him, in me. The fear thinned out and underneath it was something I didn’t expect. Freedom. Raw, screaming, full-body freedom. The kind you can’t get in a car or a classroom or a library study room. The kind that only exists at seventy miles an hour with your face pressed between someone’s shoulder blades and nothing between you and the sky.
I understood why he rode. This was what his brain sounded like when it finally went quiet.
I pressed my face into his back and breathed him in – leather and soap and wind – and held on tighter than I needed to. He didn’t tell me to loosen up. His hand dropped from the handlebar for half a second and squeezed my knee. Then back to the road. That was enough.
***
We didn’t make it inside his apartment.
His keys were in his hand when I kissed his neck from behind – impulsive, reckless, high off the ride and the wind and the feeling of his body against mine for the last thirty minutes. He turned around so fast the keys scraped against the lock. His mouth found mine and my back hit the front door and his hands grabbed my thighs and lifted.
I heard the keys hit the floor. Neither of us bent to pick them up.
My legs wrapped around his waist. His hips pinned me to the door – the wood cold through my shirt, his body burning through everything else. He ground into me and I gasped against his mouth, already wet from the ride, from the vibration of the engine that had been working me over for thirty minutes straight, from the feeling of his body between my legs for the entire drive.
“Been thinking about this since you got on the bike,” he said against my throat. His hand slid under my shirt, up my ribs, thumb dragging across my nipple through my bra. “Feeling you pressed against my back the whole ride. Your thighs squeezing me every time I took a turn.”
“Shut up and open the door.”
“No.” He rolled his hips again. Slow. The friction through our jeans devastating and nowhere near enough. “I want you right here first.”
