PUCKED BY MY STEPBROTHER: A FORBIDDEN HOCKEY ROMANCE

CHAPTER 26 - KEEPING HER CLOSE

RHYS’ POV

Fourth line.

Caleb put me on the fourth line. Leaned into Coach Harlan during the line change with his clipboard and his captain's face – the one that said team player, leader, just looking out for the program – and my name came out of Harlan's mouth attached to a rotation that had no business being anywhere near mine. Two freshmen who skated like they'd learned last week. A defenseman who'd been riding pine since October. The line you use when you're running down clock in a game nobody cares about.

I cared about this game.

Didn't say anything. Skated out. Helmet on, jaw locked, the freshmen looking at me sideways like they knew this was wrong but didn't have the rank to question it. I didn't explain. Explanation was for guys who needed people to understand them and I'd stopped needing that a long time ago. Just pushed the pace. Harder shifts. Harder hits. Turned the fourth line into something nobody expected – not a team effort, not a rotation. A demonstration. One man dragging a dead line through drills designed to bury him, making the burial look like a showcase instead.

Let the scouts figure out what that meant.

Scrimmage on Thursday. Caleb switched the play mid-shift. No call, no signal. Just redirected the formation while I was already moving, which left me stranded in the neutral zone with the puck and no lanes and three defenders collapsing on me like they'd been given a roadmap to exactly where I'd be. Because they had. The captain drew them one.

Did it again four minutes later. Different play, same result. Me isolated. No support. The ice shrinking around me while the team moved in a pattern I hadn't been told about.

After practice, loud enough for every guy on the bench to hear: "Extra conditioning for Maddox. Attitude adjustment."

Nobody looked at me. Everybody heard it. The specific silence of a locker room that knows what's happening and has collectively decided to find their skate laces fascinating.

I ran every drill. Every single one. Because that's the thing about being the guy with the expulsion on his record – you don't get to protest. You don't get to say this is bullshit and walk off because walking off is what got you expelled the first time and the second time they don't let you come back. So you run the drills. You lock your jaw and empty your eyes and put the rage in the place you built for it – the deep, cold vault where everything dangerous goes – and you perform compliance while the animal in your chest paces and paces and waits.

Next scrimmage, I let the animal out. Just a little.

Stopped passing. Every touch of the puck was mine – through defenders, around centers, past Caleb himself. Deked him so clean he turned the wrong direction and I heard someone on the bench make a sound that was either impressed or horrified and I didn't care which. Three goals in four minutes. No assists. Played like the other nine guys on the ice were obstacles, not teammates. Because the captain had decided I didn't have a team, so I showed him what happened when I agreed with him.

Felt good. Felt like fire and control and the specific satisfaction of being undeniable in a way that no lineup manipulation could hide.

Felt terrible. Because I knew what I was doing. Knew I was playing Caleb's game on Caleb's terms, turning his sabotage into my justification for acting exactly the way he wanted me to act – out of control, selfish, the animal with the stick. Giving him the story he needed. See, Coach? This is why he needs the fourth line. He can't play with a team.

The roster fractured. Could feel it in the handshakes after practice. Half the guys gripping firm – loyalty to the C, chain of command, you don't undermine the captain even when the captain's wrong. The other half gripping looser, quicker, the handshake of men who'd watched me play and knew what they were seeing and didn't want to be on the wrong side of it when the math became undeniable.

Harlan pulled us both off the ice. Didn't need to hear the words to know what they were – I could read his body from thirty feet. Finger out. Jaw set. The stance of a man who'd coached long enough to smell the difference between competition and a war being fought in his building without his permission.

"Get it together. Both of you. Next real game or you're both benched. I'll forfeit the goddamn season before I let this continue."

Caleb nodded. Concerned. Mature. Absolutely, Coach. Just want what's best for the program. Seamless. The kind of performance you'd need to take apart frame by frame to see the machinery behind it.

I didn't nod. Didn't trust my mouth. Stood there with my fists at my sides and the knowledge that one wrong word would end this the way it ended at Redmond – with my knuckles bloody and my future in a box and another school that didn't want me.

Drove home. Bag on the floor. Fridge open, fridge closed. Kitchen table. Wall.

The dark opened up. Not the angry kind – the empty kind. The one that said: see? This is what happens. You wanted something. A team. A place. A reason to be somewhere. And someone found a way to take it because that's what happens when you want things. That's the tax on giving a s**t. Someone always finds the receipt.

She was there. Across the table. Don't know when she showed up – at some point during the descent she'd appeared with her careful eyes and her careful silence and I wanted to break something because her patience meant she was about to ask me to feel something and feeling was the one thing I couldn't do right now. Not without the vault cracking open. Not without the animal getting loose in a room with someone I didn't want to hurt.

"How was practice?"

"Fine."

"Rhys."

"I said fine."

She waited. Patient. Giving me room the way she'd figured out worked – not pushing, not pressing, just sitting there being steady while I fell apart in slow motion. I hated it. Hated that she'd cracked the code. Hated that I'd let her close enough to learn how I worked and now she was using it on me and it was working and that meant I was knowable and knowable meant she could hurt me and I was so goddamn tired of being hurt.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"No."

"Okay. Do you want me to stay?"

"I don't care."

The flinch. Small. Quick. She almost caught it before I saw. Almost.

I meant every word. I meant none of them. Both true at the same time in the way that only makes sense when you're in the dark and someone's offering you a hand and you slap it away because the last hand you reached for belonged to a woman who drove away at 2 AM and didn't come back.

She left. I stayed at the table.

Didn't turn the lights on. The dark felt right. The dark felt like what I deserved – a man sitting alone in an apartment because a hockey captain had reassigned his line and instead of handling it like an adult he'd gone solo and fractured his team and then pushed away the only person in his life who wasn't trying to take something from him. Because the shame of it – not the demotion, the reaction, the proof that I was still the animal everyone said I was – was too big to show someone I was terrified of losing.

Day one. Texts that meant nothing. Busy. Practice. Later. The bare minimum to prove I was alive without proving I was present. No invitations. No showing up at her lunch table. No arm around her shoulder crossing campus because her shoulder meant contact and contact meant she'd look at me and see whatever was rotting behind my face and decide it wasn't worth it.

Day two. Nothing. Saw her near the library. Hair down. Moving through campus with the ease of someone who hadn't been ruined by the things she loved. Ten feet away. Didn't look up. Kept walking. The hardest thing I'd done all week and I'd run punishment drills for an hour without stopping.

Day three. The apartment shrinking. Walls getting closer. The silence I'd built settling around me like concrete – familiar, heavy, the shape of every other time I'd shut down and waited for the proof that shutting down was right. That the person on the other side would get tired. Stop trying. Leave.

They always left. That was the lesson. My own mother taught it at 2 AM on a driveway. Richard confirmed it with filing cabinets where bedrooms used to be. Push long enough and people go. Push long enough and the silence becomes permanent. Push long enough and you get the only thing you've ever really expected – an empty room and the quiet confirmation that you were right about yourself the whole time.

Knock.

I opened the door.

She was standing in the hallway. Not crying. Not soft. Not arranged into whatever shape she thought would make me comfortable. Just standing there with her jaw set and her eyes clear and the energy of a woman who'd walked across campus in the dark to say something she'd already decided on and wasn't asking my permission to deliver.

She stepped past me. Into my apartment. Into my dark. Turned around.

"You don't get to go cold on me every time something gets hard." Steady voice. But her chest was moving too fast – the only crack in the armour. "Shutting down. Disappearing. Three days of monosyllabic bullshit because practice was rough and feelings are scary. That's not protecting yourself, Rhys. That's punishing me for being close enough to see you."

Couldn't move. Couldn't speak. She was standing in my apartment saying every true thing I'd been hiding from and each word was landing in the place where I kept the things I wasn't ready to face and it was filling up and I didn't know what happened when it spilled over because it had never spilled over before. I'd always found a way to seal it shut. Another wall. Another layer of cold. Another person who stopped trying.

"That's Caleb's move. Don't be him."

Six words. And every wall I'd built in three days of silence cracked down the middle. Not because she was wrong. Because she was right. Because the thing I'd been doing – the cold, the retreat, the strategic emptiness designed to make her leave so I could prove that leaving was inevitable – was exactly what he would do. What he was doing. Turning distance into a weapon. Making someone earn the right to care about him and then punishing them for caring.

She was right. And she was still here. After three days of nothing. After monosyllables and cold shoulders and an apartment door that might as well have been a wall. She'd walked through the dark and knocked and stepped inside without waiting and told me the truth and she was still standing there. Looking at me. Seeing me.

Not flinching.

The apartment was dark. She was in it. The silence between us was the loudest thing I'd ever heard – louder than the crowd, louder than the ice, louder than the sound of my mother's car turning a corner nine years ago.

I didn't dare to close the door.