Chapter 15 #2
He steps inside, letting the door swing mostly shut behind him, still halfway turned toward the hallway until he finally looks up and sees me standing there.
Recognition takes a second to settle.
“Oh,” he says. “You.”
Kadin.
Of course.
He straightens a little, surprise giving way to something more measured. “You’re Octavia’s exchange kid.”
The phrase sits there between us, clumsy and too casual for how badly it lands.
He clearly means it as shorthand, not insult, but it irritates me anyway.
He studies me for another second, the expression on his face changing in a way I know too well.
He’s recalibrating. Reorganizing everything he saw last night around the fact that I’m standing in front of him sober enough to be looked at clearly.
“Look,” he says, his voice shifting into something more serious. “I never got to say thank you for trying. Last night. By the time the medics were done, you and Octavia had already left, and everything kind of went to shit after that.”
He stops, maybe waiting for me to say something decent enough to keep this conversation in one piece.
I don’t.
He doesn’t fill the silence immediately, but I can feel him starting to realize this isn’t going to be an easy exchange. I stay where I am, one hand still near the door, not because I want to leave anymore, but because suddenly I want to know how much he sees.
He mistakes the silence for distance, maybe even discomfort, and keeps going.
“I mean it,” he says. “Most people froze. You didn’t.”
That gratitude should make this easier.
Instead it makes something in me turn mean.
Because I can still see him in the pool with her. His hands on her. Her legs around his waist. The easy way he gets to stand in the world and touch things without immediately hating himself for wanting them.
The question is out of my mouth before I decide to ask it.
“What do you want from her?”
He blinks, caught off guard. “What?”
The bathroom feels smaller now, the fluorescent lights harsher. “From Octavia,” I say, the words coming flatter than I mean them to, but no less sharp. “What do you want?”
His expression changes almost immediately. The open gratitude narrows into something more cautious. He doesn’t get angry yet. He gets attentive.
“I like her,” he says after a second.
“That wasn’t my question.”
His shoulders square a little. Not dramatically. Just enough for me to notice that he’s deciding how to approach me now. There’s a pause before he speaks again, and when he does, the whole tone of the room changes.
“I looked you up.”
That stills something in me.
Not visibly, I hope, but enough that he sees he’s landed somewhere.
“After the party,” he says. “After everything that happened. After the way she looked every time you got near her. I didn’t know who you were, so I checked.”
He isn’t defensive about it. He says it like he believes he had every right.
Didn’t take much, his face says even before the words do.
“St. Augustine wasn’t hard to find,” he continues. “Court records weren’t hard to find either. Your father. The case. Enough to know you’ve got a lot more going on than some weird attitude problem.”
The fluorescent hum overhead seems to get louder. I don’t move. Neither does he.
He studies my face carefully now, no longer bothering with polite thanks or easy college-guy charm. “And I don’t think Octavia needs someone like that messing with her head.”
The sentence lands cleaner than if he’d tried to be cruel. He doesn’t sound disgusted. He sounds certain.
That certainty is what makes me step toward him.
It isn’t a big movement. Barely half a pace. But it changes the air in the room. His body goes still in response, and for the first time since he walked in, he looks at me like he understands there might actually be a line here he shouldn’t cross.
He still doesn’t back up.
“You should be careful,” I tell him.
The words come out low and steady, which is worse than if they’d come out angry. Anger can be dismissed. Control is harder to ignore.
His jaw tightens, but he keeps eye contact. “Why?”
Because I know what damage looks like from the inside. Because I know exactly how little it takes for my body to remember the wrong lessons. Because right now I can feel every old instinct in me waking up, stretching its shoulders, asking to be useful.
Instead, I tell him the version that matters.
“Because if you keep acting like you understand what she needs better than she does, I’m going to hurt you.”
That gets through.
He doesn’t flinch, but I see the reaction anyway in the way his breathing shifts and his eyes sharpen. He believes me. That much is clear. He just also believes something else.
“No,” he says after a beat. “You won’t.”
The certainty in it cuts deeper than mockery would have.
My mouth starts to open, but he steps into the silence before I can.
“You won’t,” he says again, quieter now, with an irritating kind of calm. “Because she would hate you.”
The words hit hard enough that for a second I don’t hear anything else.
He sees that too.
Of course he does.
That is the moment he really understands me, or at least enough of me to be dangerous.
He folds his arms loosely, not posturing, not trying to look bigger, just settling into the knowledge that he has found the one thing in the room stronger than my temper.
“And for some reason,” he continues, “that matters to you.”
The bathroom goes very still.
He doesn’t look smug about it. He looks almost grim, like figuring it out confirms something he had hoped wasn’t true.
“I don’t know what your deal is with her,” he says, “but I know what I saw last night. I saw her go stiff when you got close. I saw her look rattled after the party. And now I know enough about your past to know you’re not exactly someone she needs entangled in life. ”
My hands curl once at my sides before forcing themselves open again.
He notices that too, yet, he still he doesn’t retreat.
“If you really want to threaten me, go ahead,” he says. “But you won’t. Not if you care at all what she thinks of you.”
The room is small enough now that I can hear the tiny shifts in his breathing, the distant slam of a locker outside, the blood moving hard in my own ears. He has backed me into the only corner that matters, and we both know it.
Because he’s right about the worst part.
If I put him through the mirror, if I break his jaw, if I give in to the most familiar answer my body knows, she will look at me and see exactly what I’ve been trying not to become in front of her.
Or maybe she’ll just finally see what I’ve been all along.
Kadin holds my gaze for one second longer, then speaks more quietly.
“She’s had enough men make her life harder,” he says. “She doesn’t need another one just because he thinks his damage makes him different.”
The sentence sits there, ugly in its accuracy.
I don’t move.
He doesn’t either.
The tension in the room tightens into something that feels like it could still break either way, because now he knows exactly where to press, and I know exactly how much I hate that he’s chosen the one pressure point I can’t afford to ignore.
The word Brightside leaves my mouth before I can decide whether saying it is a mistake.
The second it hangs there, I know it is.
“She didn’t tell you about Brightside.”
Kadin catches it immediately. His expression changes in that quiet way people’s expressions do when they realize they’ve been handed a piece of something important without having to earn it. He does not smile. He does not gloat. Somehow that makes it worse.
“No,” he says, shaking his head slowly. “She didn’t tell me about Brightside.”
He lets the silence sit just long enough for me to understand that my question has answered something for him. Then he folds his arms loosely and adds, “Her friends are not exactly quiet. Especially when they’re drunk.”
Cheyenne. Maria. Of course.
I can practically hear them now, too loud over music and vodka, trying to protect her by turning her life into fragments and labels for anyone listening. Brightside. Dead mother. Stepbrother. Exchange student, except not really. Enough pieces for an idiot to start building a shape.
Kadin watches the realization settle in me and keeps talking, calmer now, more certain of his footing.
“How else do you think I figured out you weren’t some exchange student?” he asks. “Her adopted brother, of all things.”
The phrase lands like something rotten.
He takes a small step closer, not enough to crowd me, just enough to make it clear that whatever polite distance this conversation started with is gone now.
He is looking at me differently. Less like a guy he ran into at a party, more like a problem he has finally gotten a good enough look at to name.
“And you want her.”
He says it without emphasis, which is exactly why it hits so hard.
There is no easy response to that. Denying it would be a lie too obvious to survive his face. Admitting it would only make him sound smarter than he is, and I’m not interested in giving him that satisfaction.
He reads the silence anyway.
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “That’s what I thought.”
I feel my jaw tighten. “You should really stop acting like you understand me.”
His brows lift just slightly, but he doesn’t laugh. “I don’t think I understand you,” he says. “I think I understand enough to know she doesn’t need someone like you messing with her head.”
Someone like you.
The words could have come from anywhere. A court file. A staff meeting at St. Augustine. The mouth of any adult who ever looked at me.
But hearing it from him is different. Because he isn’t saying it as law or punishment. He’s saying it as concern for her.
That gets under my skin faster.
My hand curls once at my side and then opens again.