PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE

CHAPTER 25 - OUR FAVORITE LANGUAGE

"–and you weren't there, Rhys. That's the point."

"I was at practice."

"You're always at practice. And Caleb is always exactly where I am, saying exactly the right thing at exactly the right time, and I'm standing there being defended by the person who destroyed me because the person I'm actually with couldn't be bothered to show up."

His jaw tightened. He was leaning against the kitchen counter, arms crossed, doing that thing where his whole body went still and controlled while his eyes gave away everything. We'd been going back and forth for ten minutes and the apartment felt smaller with every sentence.

"I don't need to perform for people."

"It's not performing. It's showing up. There's a difference."

"Caleb showing up isn't kindness, Naomi. It's strategy. He defended you because it makes him look good and me look absent. That's the whole play."

"I know that. You think I don't know that? But knowing it doesn't change the fact that Jade stood in front of a dozen people and called me a downgrade and your response when I told you about her before was don't worry about it. Four words. That was the whole plan."

"What do you want me to do? Fight her in a parking lot?"

"I want you to act like I exist outside of this apartment!" My voice cracked. Not from sadness – from the frustration of loving someone who held you like oxygen in private and treated you like furniture in public. "You want to be my boyfriend behind closed doors and a stranger when it matters? Pick one."

"That's not fair."

"It's not fair that I got called captain's leftovers in front of people I have to see every day and the only person who said a word was Caleb f*****g Park."

That one landed.

His expression changed – not the jaw tightening, not the wall going up. Something underneath cracking. The look of a man who'd just been shown the gap between who he thought he was and who he was actually being, and didn't like what he saw.

The silence was thick. Both of us breathing hard. His kitchen counter between us like a barricade.

I grabbed my jacket from the chair. "I'm going home."

His hand caught my arm.

Not rough. Not gentle either. Something in between – urgent, desperate, the grip of someone who didn't have words for what he was feeling and was reaching for the only language we'd ever been fluent in.

I turned around.

His mouth hit mine before I'd finished the rotation. Hard. Angry. Tasting like the argument we hadn't finished and the apology he couldn't make. My jacket dropped. My hands grabbed his shirt and pulled instead of pushed and his body pressed me backward until my hips hit the kitchen counter and the edge bit into my lower back and I didn't care because his tongue was in my mouth and his hands were everywhere and the anger was converting into something hotter and more dangerous.

He lifted me onto the counter. My legs wrapped around him on instinct – pulling him in, grinding against the hardness I could already feel through his jeans. His mouth moved to my neck and bit down without warning – hard, punishing, a mark he was leaving on purpose – and his hand fisted in my hair and yanked my head back to give himself more skin.

He didn't speak. That was the difference. No filthy commentary, no commands, no checking in. This wasn't the Rhys who talked me through orgasms and whispered good girl against my ear. This was the version of him that had nothing left to say and was using his body to scream instead.

He pulled my shirt over my head. Unhooked my bra and his mouth found my n****e – sucking hard enough to make me cry out, teeth grazing, tongue flicking while his other hand shoved my jeans down my hips with a roughness that sent a jolt straight to my core. I was already soaked. Already aching. The argument had done something to both of us – cracked us open in a way that left nothing but raw nerve and need.

I yanked his shirt off. Raked my nails down his chest, over the tattoos, hard enough to leave welts. He made a sound – low, guttural, barely human – and pulled me off the counter. My legs still around him, his hands gripping my ass, and he turned toward the table.

His books were on it. Gatsby notes. The essay I'd graded last week. I swept them off with one arm – paper cascading, a mug shattering on the floor – and I didn't care about any of it because he was laying me back on the wood and dragging my jeans and underwear off in one motion and dropping to his knees.

His mouth was on me before my back fully hit the table. No teasing, no slow build – his tongue flat against my c**t, licking hard and fast like he was trying to devour me. My hips bucked off the wood and his hands pinned them down, fingers digging into my hip bones, holding me still while he ate me like he was starving and I was the only thing that could fill him.

I grabbed his hair. Pulled. He groaned against me and the vibration made my toes curl and my thighs clamp around his head. Two fingers pushed inside me – rough, deep, curling against the spot that made my vision fracture – while his tongue worked my c**t in tight, relentless circles.

"Rhys – f**k – I'm going to–"

He pulled away. I nearly sobbed.

He stood up. Shoved his jeans down. And pushed into me in one brutal stroke that scraped the table six inches across the floor.

My hands flew to the table's edge above my head. He was deep – impossibly deep – the angle on the hard surface meaning I felt every inch, every ridge, every throb. He pulled back and slammed in again and the table legs shrieked against the tile and my spine arched off the wood and I stopped thinking entirely.

He f****d me like the argument was still happening. Like every thrust was a sentence he couldn't say out loud. His hands gripping my hips hard enough to bruise, his jaw clenched, his eyes locked on mine with something that wasn't anger anymore – it was fear. Raw, undiluted fear dressed up as fury because that was easier to wear.

I came on the table with his name tearing out of my throat and my nails leaving scratches in the wood. He didn't stop. Pulled out – I whimpered at the loss – flipped me over onto my stomach and pushed back in from behind. My cheek pressed against the table. My hands scrambling for something to hold. He gripped my hair with one hand, my hip with the other, and drove into me at a pace that was just past the edge of too much.

His other hand snaked around – found my c**t, still swollen and oversensitive from the first orgasm – and rubbed in fast, sloppy circles while he f****d me from behind. I was shaking. Overstimulated. The second orgasm building on top of the aftershocks of the first like a wave stacking on a wave.

I came again. Harder. My whole body seizing, clenching around him, a sound leaving my mouth that was half scream half sob. He followed – burying deep, hips slamming against my ass, cumming with a groan he tried to muffle against my shoulder blade and failed.

Stillness.

Both of us bent over his kitchen table. Breathing like we'd run for our lives. His forehead between my shoulder blades. My cheek against the wood. His books on the floor. A shattered mug. Gatsby's notes scattered everywhere.

He pulled out slowly. Lifted me off the table – gently now, the anger spent – and we ended up on the floor. His back against the wall. Me in his lap. Tangled. Wrecked. My bra somewhere near the fridge.

The tension was gone. Dissolved. f****d out of both of us and replaced with the heavy, boneless calm that always came after.

The problem wasn't gone.

I knew this pattern. Could see it forming the way you see clouds building – the argument, the avoidance, the bodies crashing together as a substitute for the conversation we couldn't have. It worked now. It felt like resolution. But it wasn't. It was a painkiller, not a cure, and eventually the dose would stop working and we'd be left with all the things we'd been f*****g around instead of through.

I stared at the ceiling. He stared at me. His hand was in my hair, stroking slowly, and his eyes were soft in a way that almost convinced me this was enough.

Almost.

Neither of us said it out loud. But lying there on his kitchen floor with his heartbeat under my palm and the wreckage of our argument scattered around us, we both knew the truth.

The thing we were best at together might be the thing that ruins us.