3. Penelope
Cat and Kaiden’s room is an argument in interior design.
His side: dark. Clean. A lacrosse stick leaning in the corner. Sneakers lined up. A framed photo of the Elite Five from sophomore year on the nightstand. The minimalism of a boy who grew up in chaos and now keeps every surface clear because clutter feels like losing control.
Her side: organized chaos. A stack of engineering textbooks that doubles as a nightstand.
Three different eyeliner pencils on the dresser.
The Claddagh ring in a small ceramic dish—the one she takes off to sleep, the one Kaiden gave her during a snowstorm that I will never stop making fun of them for.
Concert ticket stubs pinned to a corkboard.
Her Vans by the door, the black ones she wears when the uniform shoes come off.
They share this room the way they share everything else—completely, without apology, with the ease of two people who stopped pretending they were anything other than a unit the moment Cat moved into the Monaghan house with Thomas.
Tonight, Kaiden has been banished. Girl’s weekend.
He put up a theatrical protest, kissed Cat in the doorway for long enough that I threatened to time them, and retreated to the pool house with Danny and Ryan and whatever video game is currently consuming their collective brain cell.
Thomas and Callum are downstairs watching something on TV that involves a lot of yelling at referees. Saoirse is—
Saoirse is everywhere. That’s the thing about Kaiden’s mom.
She doesn’t hover—she orbits. Checking in without knocking.
Leaving snacks outside the door. Texting Cat to ask if we need anything.
The pure warmth of a woman who runs a nonprofit for women during the day and runs a household full of damaged teenagers at night and somehow never runs out of energy for either.
Cat comes back from the bathroom and flops onto the bed, rolling me over to face her with the specific force of a girl who has decided that sulking time is over and talking time has begun.
“Alright. Spill. You’ve been staring out the window like a sad Victorian ghost for twenty minutes and I’ve been very patient but my patience has a shelf life and it just expired.”
I pull my knees to my chest. Hug them. The defensive geometry of a girl who is about to be honest and hates it.
“I’m crushed, Cat. I knew he was pulling away—I’ve known for months. But to stand in that pool house and say those things? In front of everyone? He looked at me like I was nothing. Like everything we’ve been to each other since we were born was… nothing.”
“It wasn’t nothing. He’s in a dark place, Penny. That doesn’t excuse what he said—not even close—but the Xander in that pool house is not the Xander you grew up with.”
“Isn’t he, though?” I look at her. “What if the nice version was the mask and this is what’s been underneath the whole time?”
“That’s not how it works and you know it. People don’t become cruel by nature—they learn it. And Xander learned it from a master.”
Lucian. She doesn’t say the name. She doesn’t need to.
I sigh. Lean back against the headboard. Cat hands me the vape pen—the discreet one she keeps in her nightstand for nights when the anxiety gets louder than the coping mechanisms. I take a hit. Blow the vapor toward the ceiling.
“He was changing before,” I say. “Before his mom. Before the Penningtons. Something shifted in him after… after what happened with Garrett. When we were thirteen.”
Cat goes still. She knows this story—pieces of it.
She knows Garrett Pennington tried to assault me and Xander stopped him.
She knows it’s the fault line underneath everything.
But we don’t talk about it much—not because Cat can’t handle it, but because talking about Garrett means talking about the boy who became Jack Rose who became the monster Cat killed in her parents’ kitchen, and that thread connects all of us in ways that feel less like coincidence and more like a curse.
“After that day,” I continue, “X couldn’t look at me without seeing it.
I could feel it—the way he’d start to reach for my hand and then pull back.
The way he’d look at me and look away, like seeing my face triggered the memory.
How do you stay close to someone when every time they look at you, they see the worst day of your life? ”
“You don’t,” Cat says quietly. “You build walls. You push people away. You turn the love into anger because anger doesn’t make you vulnerable the way love does.”
“Speaking from experience?”
“Obviously.” She gives me a small smile. “Kaid and I wrote the playbook on that particular brand of self-destruction. But we figured it out. X can too. It just… takes longer for some people.”
I take another hit from the vape. The vapor hangs between us like a curtain. “Cat.”
“Yeah.”
“I need to tell you about the closet.”
She sits up straighter. Not alarmed—alert. The posture of a girl who has been waiting for this conversation and is ready to hold whatever comes out.
“The fight. He was pissed because some guy was talking to me—big dude, creepy, wouldn’t take a hint.
X shoved him off me and then kissed me. Like…
kissed me. In front of everyone. And it was—” I pause.
Look for the right word. “Overwhelming. Like being caught in a wave. One second I’m standing there and the next second we’re in a closet and he’s closing the door and his hands are on me and everything is happening very fast.”
“Did you want it to happen?” Cat asks. No judgment. No leading. Just the question, laid flat on the bed between us.
“I… didn’t not want it.” I know how that sounds.
I can hear how that sounds. “He didn’t ask, Cat.
He didn’t stop and look at me and say ‘is this okay.’ He just…
took over. And I let him. I didn’t say no.
I didn’t push him away. I could have. He would have stopped—I think he would have stopped.
But I didn’t say anything because I wanted him to touch me.
I’ve wanted him to touch me for years and it was finally happening and I didn’t want it to stop even though it was too fast and too rough and we were in a fucking cleaning closet. ”
Cat is quiet for a moment. Processing. I can see her running it through the filter of her own experience—the things that happened to her, the lines between consent and coercion and the gray space where they blur.
“Did he hurt you?”
“It hurt. But not… I don’t think he meant to. He was just… he wasn’t there, Cat. Like his body was, but his mind was somewhere else. Somewhere dark. And I was just… the nearest warm thing.”
Silence.
“Penny. You were a virgin.”
The statement hangs. I nod. Don’t trust my voice.
“And he didn’t know.”
“How could he know? We never—we’ve never done anything before that night. We’ve never even kissed before that night. Eighteen years of friendship bracelets and treehouse sleepovers and walking home from school and then boom—a closet in Bridgeport.”
Cat exhales. Long. Controlled. The exhale of a girl who is managing her own reaction to protect mine. “Okay. Here’s what I’m going to say, and I need you to hear it without deflecting or making a joke. Can you do that?”
“No promises.”
“What happened in that closet is complicated. It’s not black and white.
You didn’t say no, and that matters. But he didn’t ask, and that matters too.
The fact that you wanted him doesn’t erase the fact that he didn’t check.
And losing your virginity like that—in that place, at that speed, without a conversation—that’s something you’re going to need to process.
Not because you’re broken. Because it was your first time and it deserved more than a closet. ”
I blink. Tears. Fuck.
“The worst part?” My voice is small. “I liked it. Parts of it. The way he took control. The way he talked to me—dirty, possessive, like I belonged to him. That’s fucked up, right? That I liked that?”
“It’s not fucked up. It’s a preference. There’s a whole world of people who like that—dominance, submission, the power exchange.
Kaid and I…” She gives me a look. The look that says we are about to share information that cannot be unshared.
“We go there. Hard. Choking, grabbing, tying up. The works. And it’s hot as hell.
But the difference—and this is the part that matters—is that we talked about it first. Boundaries.
Safe words. What’s on the table and what’s off.
The rough stuff works because the trust is there underneath it. ”
“Xander and I don’t have that.”
“No. You don’t. Not yet. And until you do, what happened in that closet is going to sit in your body like an unfinished sentence. You need to talk about it. With him. Or with a therapist. Preferably both.”
I wipe my eyes. “You sound like Darla.”
“Darla is right about most things. Which reminds me—are you actually going to therapy? And don’t say ‘I’m fine’ because I will literally sit on you.”
“I went a few times. It wasn’t… it didn’t click.”
Cat studies me. The radar. The bullshit detector. She’s looking at my eyes—checking pupil size, I realize with a sick jolt, because Cat O’Farrell knows what high looks like and she’s checking. I meet her gaze. My pupils are fine. The last pill was hours ago. I’m in the window of normal.
“Penny.” Her voice changes. Softer. The voice she uses when she’s not interrogating—when she’s just a girl who loves her best friend and is terrified of losing her.
“You haven’t been the same since the kidnapping.
I know I haven’t either. But I’m doing the work—therapy, meds, Darla, Kaiden.
I’m crawling my way back. And I look at you and I see someone who’s going in the other direction, and I don’t know how to help because you won’t let me in. ”
“You have enough on your plate, Cat. You don’t need my shit on top of yours.”