Secretly Dating My Alpha Hockey Stepbrother

Skylar Pov

The rain sounded like fists hitting the car roof. I was twelve years old, sitting in the passenger seat with my knees pulled up to my chest. My shoes were wet from running from the mall entrance to the car. Mom laughed at me, shaking water from her hair.

"You act like you're going to melt," she said.

"I hate rain," I mumbled.

"You loved it when you were little. You used to jump in puddles barefoot."

"That was before I had sense."

Mom laughed again. She had a loud laugh. It filled up the whole car and made the windows feel smaller than they were. I didn't know then that I would spend years trying to remember the exact shape of that sound and always falling short.

We stopped at a red light. Mom reached over and tucked a piece of wet hair behind my ear. Her fingers were cold from the rain, but her touch was warm underneath. It was the kind of touch that said you are safe without needing words.

"Your dad's going to be mad we're late," she said.

"He's always mad."

"He's not mad. He's just tired. Work is hard right now."

I didn't answer. I looked out the window at the rain running down the glass in crooked rivers. The streetlights made everything look blurry and yellow, like the whole world had been painted with old watercolors. The car smelled like her rose perfume and the salty ghost of the French fries we ate at the mall food court. I was full and sleepy and annoyed about being wet. That was all. That was the last normal feeling I ever had.

The light turned green.

Mom pressed the gas.

I didn't see the other car until its headlights swallowed my whole window in white. Mom screamed my name. Not words. Just my name. Her right hand flew off the steering wheel and shot across my chest, pressing me back against the seat like she could shield me with her arm alone.

The impact did not sound the way I thought crashes sounded. It was not a bang or a boom. It was a deep, grinding crunch that I felt in my ribs before my ears caught up. The sound of metal folding. The sound of glass turning to dust. My body slammed sideways against the seatbelt, and then the airbag punched me in the face with the force of something alive and angry.

Glass sprayed across my lap like tiny pieces of ice.

Then the car stopped moving, and everything went quiet.

For a long moment, I was nowhere. Someplace dark and soft. Then I blinked, and the world came back in pieces. The car had spun. My window was a spiderweb of cracks. Rain dripped through the broken glass and landed on my cheek, cold and slow, like someone crying on my face.

The engine hissed. Far away, a horn blared without stopping.

"Mom?"

My voice came out wrong. Small and thin, like a little kid's voice. Like the voice I had before I grew up.

She didn't answer.

I turned my head toward her, and the movement sent a hot spike of pain down my neck. Something warm was running under the collar of my shirt, spreading down toward my chest. I couldn't tell where it was coming from.

Mom was slumped against her door. Her head hung at an angle that didn't make sense. The airbag on her side had deployed, but the other car had hit us there, on her side. The door was crushed inward like a giant had pushed his thumb into it.

"Mom," I said again. Louder this time. "Wake up."

She didn't move.

I reached for her. The seatbelt locked tight and bit into my shoulder. I stretched as far as I could, my fingers straining, and managed to grab a fold of her jacket sleeve. The fabric was wet. Warm. I didn't understand what that meant yet.

"Please. Mom. Please wake up."

My hand was shaking. My whole body was shaking. I pulled at her sleeve the way I used to pull at her shirt when I was little and wanted her attention. A small, desperate tug. A child's plea.

She didn't look at me.

"Please. Please. I'll be good. I'll be so good. Just wake up. Just look at me. Mom. Mommy."

The word tasted like salt. Tears or blood, I couldn't tell anymore. Everything was wet. The rain kept coming through the broken window, cold on one side of my face while the other side burned.

Sirens. Far away and getting closer. Red and blue lights started spinning somewhere behind my eyes.

"Help!" I screamed. The word scraped my throat raw. "Somebody help us! My mom won't wake up!"

Headlights swept across the road. Doors slammed. Running footsteps splashed through puddles. A beam of light cut through the shattered window and landed on my face. I squinted and held up my free hand.

"Over here! There's a kid in here!"

The door on my side screamed as someone pried it open. Cold air rushed in. Hands reached for me—big hands, gentle but firm, unclipping my seatbelt and pulling me away from the seat.

"No," I said. I tried to twist out of their grip. "No, my mom first. Help her first. She's not waking up. Please, you have to help her first."

The hands kept pulling. A man in a dark uniform lifted me out of the car and into the rain. Over his shoulder, I watched another paramedic walk to my mother's side of the car. He shone a flashlight through the window. He stood there for a moment. Then he lowered the flashlight. He looked at the man holding me.

He shook his head.

I didn't understand. I didn't want to understand.

"Put me down," I said. My voice was high and strange. "Put me down. Why isn't anyone helping her? She's right there. She's right there!"

The paramedic carried me to the back of an ambulance. A woman wrapped a silver blanket around my shoulders. The foil crinkled every time I moved. She had kind eyes and a tight mouth, the kind of mouth that knew bad news before she said it.

"Sweetheart," she said. "What's your name?"

"Skylar. My mom is still in the car. Why won't you help her?"

"There are people with your mom. I need you to tell me if anything hurts. Does your neck hurt?"

"My neck is fine. Please. Please, you have to go get her."

The woman pressed a square of gauze to the side of my neck. When she pulled it back, it was dark red. She pressed another one on and held it there.

"You're bleeding, sweetheart. I need you to be brave and stay still for me, okay?"

"I don't care if I'm bleeding. My mom—"

"Shh." Her voice cracked just a little. "Just stay still. You're being very brave."

I stopped fighting. Not because I was brave. Because my body ran out of fight. The shivering took over, deep and violent, rattling my bones. The woman kept pressure on my neck and asked me questions I don't remember answering.

Through the open ambulance doors, I watched the rain fall on my mother's car. The red and blue lights spun across the wet metal. Someone pulled a white sheet from a bag and walked toward her side.

I looked away before they covered her.

The ambulance doors closed.

We started moving. The sirens came on again, loud and wailing, and I lay on the stiff bed with the foil blanket crinkling under me. The paramedic held my hand. I stared at the ceiling and listened to the sirens and felt something crack open inside my chest. A clean split, like ice breaking. I didn't have a word for it then, but I know it now.

Grief. The first breath of it.

My mother was gone.

I was still here.

And for reasons I didn't understand, that felt like the cruelest thing of all.