Faking It with My Hockey Enemy

The first thing I noticed when Mason walked through the door was that he was not alone.

The second thing I noticed was who she was.

Sienna Vale.

My fork hit the plate with a sound like a crack. Mom looked up from the salad bowl. Dad paused mid-sentence. Mason grinned from the doorway with his arm around her like he had just carried in a trophy.

"This is Sienna," he said, voice full of a pride I had never heard him aim at anything that wasn't hockey. "She just transferred here this semester. We've been I've been wanting to introduce her for a while."

Sienna smiled at my parents. Warm. Perfect. The kind of smile that belonged on a magazine cover.

Then she looked at me.

The smile thinned at the edges. Sharpened. She had the same eyes she always did — patient, calculating, already planning three moves ahead. In high school those eyes used to find me across a crowded cafeteria right before she said something that would follow me for a week.

"Lila Bennett," she said, soft and sweet. "I didn't know you two were family."

She knew. She had always known everything.

"Small world," I managed.

Mom clapped her hands. "Oh, how wonderful! Sit down, please, sit down. We have plenty of room. Lila, pass the bread."

I passed the bread. My hands were steady. I was proud of that.

Mason pulled out the chair across from me of course he did and Sienna settled into it like she was taking a throne. She had not stopped watching me. I kept my eyes on my plate and moved food around and smiled at the right moments when Dad made his usual bad jokes and tried to remember how to breathe in a room that suddenly had too many people in it.

She had tripped me in the hallway on a Tuesday in ninth grade and stood over me while the people around her laughed. She had screenshotted something I posted when I was fifteen and not yet wise enough to make my account private and sent it around the school with a caption that took me two months to stop hearing in my own voice. She had found me crying in the bathroom during junior year — I cannot even remember what I was crying about, something small, something that had already stopped mattering — and stood there with her phone out long enough to get the shot.

That photo made it to three different group chats before I made it home.

And now she was sitting in my family's dining room, touching Mason's arm, telling my parents she had always loved hockey.

"You play?" Dad asked, delighted.

"I grew up watching it," she said. "My dad played in college. It's basically a religion in my house."

Mason lit up. "See? I told you she was perfect."

I took a sip of water.

"So Lila," Sienna said, tilting her head toward me. Her voice had that particular quality — warm enough for the table, pointed enough for me. "What are you working on these days? I remember you were always writing something in high school."

Mason looked at me with the mild surprise of someone who had forgotten a detail. "Wait, you write?"

"Just for fun," I said. "Nothing serious."

"She's being modest." Sienna smiled. "I always thought she had a real gift for it. Really vivid imagination."

The way she said vivid put something cold at the back of my neck.

She knew. Or she had found something. Or she was guessing in the exact direction of the truth and watching my face to confirm it.

I pushed my chair back. "I've got a paper due. I'm sorry dinner was great, Mom. It's really nice to meet you, Sienna."

I said it looking right at her. She held my gaze and smiled wider.

"Likewise," she said. "I'm sure we'll be seeing a lot of each other."

I made it upstairs without running. That counted for something.

My room felt smaller than usual. I closed the door and stood with my back against it, pressing my palms flat to the wood, and listened to the sound of Mason's laugh carrying up through the floor. He was so happy. He had no idea.

My laptop was open on my desk. The document from last night still glowed on the screen — four thousand words I had written between midnight and two in the morning, the kind of writing that came out when I stopped trying to be careful. The kind I never let anyone see.

The hero had Mason's jawline and the way Mason tilted his head when he was trying to understand something. I had told myself it was just fiction. I had been telling myself that for two years.

I closed the laptop.

The door opened behind me without a knock.

I knew before I turned around.

Sienna stood in the doorway holding the laptop open in both hands, screen facing me, light from my own words washing across her face. She had moved fast. She had probably excused herself to use the bathroom before I even reached the top of the stairs.

She let the silence do the work for a moment. Then she spoke, low enough that only I could hear.

"Chapter three is my personal favorite," she said. "He sounds exactly like Mason. Did you know that? The hands, the jaw, the way he says her name." She tilted her head. "How long has this been going on, Lila?"

My mouth was dry. "Close the laptop and get out of my room."

"Or what?" She stepped inside and pulled the door shut behind her with a soft, deliberate click. "You'll tell Mason his sweet little stepsister has been writing fantasies about him for two years? I don't think that conversation goes the way you want it to."

I had no answer. She knew I had no answer. That was the whole point.

She tucked the laptop under her arm and smiled the real one this time, the one I remembered from hallways and bathroom doorways and every moment she had ever decided I was the easiest thing in her reach.

"I'll be in touch," she said. "Don't go anywhere."

She left. The door clicked shut.

I stood in the middle of my room and listened to the sound of my own heartbeat and tried to figure out how I was going to survive this.