11. Penelope #3
He stops. Six inches away. Close enough that I can feel the heat coming off him, can smell the eucalyptus soap that doesn’t smell like him, can see the pulse hammering in his throat and the particular darkness in his eyes that is not anger but the thing anger becomes when you strip it down to its source.
Want. Raw, unfiltered, the kind that doesn’t ask permission because it doesn’t know how. “So you and Iz.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
His hand comes up. Not to my throat—to my hair.
He runs his fingers through it, slow, pulling it away from my face, tucking it behind my ear the same way Iz did an hour ago.
The deliberate recreation. The possessiveness of a boy who is marking territory by repeating another boy’s gestures with more intensity.
His fingers trail down. Along my jaw. My neck. Finding the pulse point—the same spot from last night, the place where he pressed his thumb and felt my heart and told me not to take it away.
“Don’t lie to me, Penelope.” Low. The voice. The one that makes my body do things my brain does not approve. “I watched you in the library. His hands on your face. Your hair. You were looking right at me while he touched you. Was that the point? A little show for me?”
“You don’t get to ask me that.” My voice is thin. Breathy. The betrayal of a body that is responding to proximity despite the explicit instructions of the mind. “You don’t get to walk away from me in hallways and then show up in my bedroom demanding to know who’s touching me.”
“Who’s touching you is always my business.
” His fingers tighten on my neck. Not squeezing.
Holding. The grip that says “you are mine” in a language my body speaks fluently and my brain is screaming at me to stop translating.
“It has been my business since I was thirteen years old with a lacrosse stick and blood on my shoes. Nobody touches you, Penny. Nobody.”
“You don’t own me, Xander.”
“No. I don’t.” His thumb traces my pulse.
Slow. Counting the beats. “But this does.” He presses harder against the vein.
“This heartbeat. This pulse. The one I felt when you were cold on the treehouse floor and I couldn’t tell if it was still there.
This is mine. Not because I claimed it. Because it was given to me.
You gave it to me, Penny. When we were seven.
When you tied a bracelet on my wrist and said forever. ”
“You don’t even have the bracelet anymore.
” The words come out wet. The hurt that has been sitting in my chest since last night—the bare wrist, the absence, the symbol of everything we were reduced to a plastic evidence bag somewhere in a police station.
“They cut it off you and you didn’t even fight to keep it. ”
Something cracks in his face. Behind the dark eyes, behind the predator stance, behind the possessive grip on my throat—something breaks. The mask slips. What’s underneath is not the Lucian face. It’s the boy face. The Xander face. The one from the swings and the treehouse and the pink backpack.
“I was in handcuffs, Penny. I couldn’t—” His voice falters. “They had to cut it. I begged them not to. I told them what it was. They didn’t care.”
His hand leaves my throat. Both hands find my face. Cupping. Holding. The tenderness that lives underneath all the violence—the version of Xander that only exists in rooms where the door is closed and nobody can see him being gentle.
He kisses me.
Soft. Not the closet kiss—not the claiming, crashing, desperate collision of two people drowning.
This is different. This is slow. His lips on mine like a question rather than a demand.
His thumbs on my cheekbones, holding my face like it’s something valuable, something he’s afraid he’ll break if he presses too hard.
I kiss him back. Because my body doesn’t care about the pool house or the Plan B or the hallway. My body cares about the taste of his mouth and the heat of his hands and the particular electricity that runs between us when we stop fighting and start touching.
The kiss deepens. His tongue slides against mine. His hands move from my face to my waist, gripping, pulling me against him. I can feel all of him—chest to chest, hip to hip, the hard evidence of what kissing me does to his body pressing against my stomach through the layers of our uniforms.
My hands go to his neck. Pull him closer. The sound I make—the whimper, the one from the kitchen, the one I can’t control—escapes into his mouth and I feel him react to it. A groan. Low. Vibrating against my lips.
He walks me backward. The back of my knees hit the bed. He lowers me down—careful, controlled, his hand behind my head so it doesn’t hit the mattress, the choreography of a boy who is trying to be gentle and doesn’t fully trust himself to succeed.
He’s over me. Between my legs. His weight on his forearms, his mouth on my neck, his hips pressing into mine with a rhythm that is not quite grinding and not quite holding still—the space between movement and restraint.
I reach up. My arms around his neck. Pulling him down. Wanting more—more pressure, more contact, more of the particular annihilation that happens when Xander Anderson touches me and the rest of the world ceases to exist.
His eyes open and I see it happen—the return.
The particular moment when the boy comes back and the situation registers and the weight of what he’s doing—on her bed, in her house, with her parents downstairs and a recovery program folder on the coffee table and the treehouse three days in the rearview—hits him like a wave.
He pulls back. Fast. Like I burned him.
“Fuck.” He’s standing. Backing toward the door. His hand in his hair, pulling, the gesture of a boy trying to physically rearrange his own brain. “Fuck. I can’t—I can’t do this, Penny. I’m sorry. I can’t—”
He’s gone. The door opens and closes and his footsteps are in the hallway and the guest room door slams and I am alone on my bed with swollen lips and his cologne on my skin and the devastation of a girl who was just kissed like she was worth something and then watched the boy decide she wasn’t.
That’s not what happened. I know that’s not what happened.
He stopped because he’s trying. Because three days ago he found me overdosed and he’s terrified and the last time he didn’t stop we ended up in a closet and the aftermath destroyed us both.
He stopped because stopping is the right thing to do.
But knowing that doesn’t stop it from hurting.
I pull the blanket over me. Curl up. The tears come—quiet, the kind I’m getting good at. The kind that fall sideways onto the pillow without sound.
For those few minutes, I felt alive. I felt wanted. Not rescued, not protected, not managed. Wanted. His mouth on mine and his hands on my face and the sound he made when I whimpered—that was want. Pure, unfiltered, the kind that doesn’t need drugs to manufacture.
And then he ran. Because Xander Anderson cannot handle wanting me. Wanting me terrifies him more than the cage, more than Lucian, more than the closet where his mother died. Wanting me means being vulnerable, and vulnerability in the Anderson house is the thing that gets you hit.
I hear my parents coming upstairs. Flip the light off. Pull the blanket to my chin. Close my eyes. The performance of sleep.
The door creaks open. My mom’s voice, a whisper: “Shhh, Gideon. Penny’s sleeping already. Poor girl.”
They close the door. I open my eyes in the dark.
Poor girl. Poor fucking girl is right.
My hand finds the friendship bracelet on my wrist. Teal and yellow. Faded. Still there. Mine is still there.
Through the wall: silence. Xander’s room. I press my hand to the wall—the same spot he pressed his last night, the same two feet of drywall and paint between two people who keep reaching for each other through the plaster and can’t find a way through.
I pull out my phone. Call Cat.
She picks up. “How was the intake?”
“Darla was great. The program sounds real. I wrote a letter to my future self and cried.”
“And X?”
“He kissed me.”
Silence. Then: “Details. Now.”
“After Darla left. He came to my room. Hand on my throat, then my face, then he kissed me. Soft, Cat. Not like the closet. Like he was asking. And I kissed him back and it was—it was everything. And then he stopped. Panicked. Said he couldn’t do this. Left.”
“Of course he did.” Cat sighs. “He’s trying, Penny. The stopping? That IS the trying. The old Xander wouldn’t have stopped. He’s learning.”
“I know. I know that in my brain. But my body doesn’t care about learning curves. My body just wants him to stay.”
“Give him time. Give yourself time. You both just started a recovery program literally today. Maybe don’t add ‘navigating the most complicated sexual and romantic relationship in Edgewood history’ to your first week’s to-do list.”
A wet laugh. “You sound like Darla.”
“Darla is right about most things. Now tell me about Iz, because Kaiden said something cryptic and I need information.”
I tell her. The feelings. The Bella angle. The library. She listens. Processes. Delivers her verdict with the particular authority of Catherine O’Farrell, who has never been wrong about a relationship dynamic and has the receipts to prove it.
“Iz is a good man. But he’s not your man. And Bella is going to destroy him when she finds out he used you to make her jealous, and I am going to buy a front-row seat to that destruction.”
“You’re terrible.”
“I’m honest. There’s a difference. Now go to sleep. First group is Monday. You need rest.”
“Cat.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m trying.”
“I know you are. And that’s enough. For now, that’s enough.”
We don’t hang up. We fall asleep on the phone—the way we do now, the new ritual, two girls breathing in the dark through their phone speakers. The sound of someone else alive on the other end of the line.
Through the wall: a sound. Quiet. Almost nothing. Xander’s fist against something—the bed, the pillow, the wall. The sound of a boy who is alone in a room fighting the same war I’m fighting, reaching for the same pills I’m reaching for, and choosing—tonight, just tonight—not to reach.
We’re trying. Both of us. Separately. On opposite sides of a wall. Reaching for each other through the plaster.
Maybe that’s enough for now.