12. Xander #2
The parking lot. Penny heads to her SUV.
Iz walks with her. She reaches for the door handle.
He catches it—shuts it gently, his body between her and the door, caging her against the car with his arms on either side.
She looks up at him. He looks down at her.
The move of two people who are about to kiss and both know it.
He takes her face in his hands. Leans down. Kisses her.
It’s not the hallway performance. It’s slower. Gentler. His mouth on hers with the care of a boy who is aware that the girl he’s kissing is fragile and valuable and not his, and is kissing her anyway because the heart doesn’t respond to logic any better than the body responds to withdrawal.
Penny kisses him back. Her hands on his chest. Her body leaning into his. The kiss deepens—his leg slides between hers, her back arching against the car, and the sound she makes—
The whimper. MY whimper. The sound she makes for me, in my closet, with my hands on her—she’s making it for him.
I slam my hand on the steering wheel. The horn blares. Across the parking lot, Iz and Penny break apart. She looks in my direction—can’t see me through the tinted glass, but she knows. She always knows.
Iz helps her into her car. His hand slides under the hem of her skirt as she climbs in—brief, possessive, the gesture of a man staking a claim in a language that doesn’t require words.
I pull out of the lot. Drive. Anywhere. The aimless velocity of a boy who has just watched another man touch the only person who makes the noise quiet and is choosing—choosing—not to respond with violence.
Is he better for her? Is Iz—warm, kind, emotionally fluent, the boy who asks before he touches and listens when she talks—is he better for Penny than I am?
Probably. Almost certainly.
But she didn’t choose probably. She chose me. At seven. With a bracelet and a word that meant something.
The question isn’t whether Iz is better. The question is whether I can become the version of me that deserves the choice she already made. I turn the car around. Head home. The MacHale house. The porch light.
Dinner at the MacHale house is the performance I was born to give.
Alice has made—or rather, Gideon has made and Alice has beautifully plated—a pasta that fills the kitchen with the smell of garlic and basil and the particular domesticity of a family that functions the way families are supposed to function.
I sit directly across from Penny. Deliberate.
The chair I chose because it gives me the best sightline to her face.
She shifts in her seat. Crosses her legs. Uncrosses them. The discomfort of a girl who can feel my eyes on her and can’t decide if she wants them there or wants them gone.
“How was school, Penny?” Gideon. The routine question. The anchor of normalcy.
“Fine.” She picks up her fork. Doesn’t look at me. “Just a long day.”
“And you, Xander?”
I smile. The real one. Not the Lucian smile—the one I’m learning to rebuild from scratch, the one that requires actual warmth instead of performed menace.
“Good, actually. Had some real talks with the guys today. Ryan opened up about some stuff. Felt like… felt like we’re getting back to who we were. Before everything.”
Gideon nods. The nod of a man who knows what “before everything” means and is glad to hear its ghost.
Alice turns to me with the brightness of a woman who has decided that this dinner will be normal even if normality has to be constructed by force.
“I had wonderful news today. A gallery in town wants to host a showcase—local artists, emerging talent, kids from the community who don’t have access to traditional exhibition spaces.
They want my work on the walls alongside theirs. ”
“That’s amazing, Alice. What kind of showcase?”
Penny kicks me under the table. Hard. Her Converse connecting with my shin. I don’t flinch. I don’t break eye contact with Alice. The particular discipline of a boy who has been kicked harder by professionals and is not going to let Penny MacHale’s footwear derail his charm offensive.
Alice lights up. “I want to give platform to people who don’t have one. Kids who paint on cardboard. Women who sculpt in their garages. Artists who’ve never shown in a gallery because galleries have gatekeepers and the gatekeepers don’t look like them.”
Gideon takes her hand across the table. “I’m so damn proud of you, Alice. Those galleries are lucky to have you.”
Penny pretends to gag. But underneath the performance, I see it—the softness.
The adoration she has for her parents’ love.
The particular ache of a girl who watches two people love each other with such ease and wonders why the version of love she’s experienced has been nothing but hard edges and sharp corners.
That’s what I want to give her. What Gideon gives Alice. The kind of love that doesn’t require armor.
After dinner, I help clean. Penny disappears upstairs claiming a headache. I dry dishes beside Alice while Gideon puts leftovers away, and for twenty minutes the kitchen is just the sound of water and clinking plates and the peace of a household that runs on love instead of fear.
Then I wait.
Eleven-fifteen. The house is dark. The security system chirps—Alice and Gideon heading to their wing. Their door closes. The hallway goes silent.
I stand in front of Penny’s door. My hand on the knob. The hesitation of a boy who is about to do something that is either very brave or very stupid and cannot tell the difference.
I open the door. She’s at the window. Backlit by the moon and the porch light. T-shirt and underwear. Her hair down—no braid, no bun. The teal streaks catching the light. Her legs bare. The friendship bracelet on her wrist, visible even from the doorway.
She turns. Sees me. Her eyes go wide, then narrow. “What the fuck are you doing, Xander.”
I close the door behind me. Soft. The click of the latch. “Just wanted to see you.”
“You saw me at dinner. Isn’t that enough?”
“No.” I walk toward her. Slow. Not the predator walk—something different. Something I’m inventing in real time, a pace that is deliberate without being threatening, direct without being aggressive. The new walk. The one I’m building alongside the new smile. “It will never be enough, Penelope.”
“Stop. Stop playing mind games with me, X. I can’t do this. Every time you get close, you pull away. Every time you kiss me, you run. I am not a toy you play with when the loneliness gets too loud.”
I reach out. Touch the ends of her hair. The teal, fading, soft between my fingers. “No mind games tonight, Penny. Just honesty. Can you handle that?”
“I’m not playing this game. I’m seeing somebody.” She crosses her arms. The defensive geometry. “Iz makes me feel happy. Wanted. Loved.”
The words are aimed. Designed to wound. And they do—but not in the place she’s aiming for.
Not in the jealousy center. In the place underneath, where the truth lives: Iz gave her the things I should have been giving her.
Happiness. Wanting. Love. The basic emotional nutrients that I starved her of for months while I was too busy drowning in my own shit to notice she was drowning in hers.
I step closer. She steps back. I follow. The dance—our dance, the one we’ve been doing since the closet, the advance-and-retreat, the particular choreography of two people who are magnetized and terrified and can’t stop circling each other.
She sits on the edge of the bed. Not because she chose to—because her knees hit the mattress and there was nowhere else to go. I stand over her. Not looming—positioning. My hands on either side of her, palms flat on the comforter.
She looks up at me. Cheeks flushed. Breathing fast. The blush is crawling down her neck, across her collarbones, disappearing under the t-shirt. Goosebumps on her arms despite the warm room.
“You and I both know,” I say, low, the voice she responds to, the one I’m learning to use with intent instead of desperation, “that whatever is happening with Iz is not what your body wants.”
“You don’t know what my body wants.”
I trace my finger up her bare thigh. Slow. Feather-light. From her knee to the hem of her t-shirt, following the goosebumps, watching her body react to my touch the way a seismograph reacts to tremors—each point of contact registering, amplifying, the needle swinging.
“You’re not turned on at all, Penny?”
“No.” But her voice is breathless. Her thighs press together. The involuntary response of a body that is contradicting its owner.
My hand slides higher. Thumb brushing the edge of her underwear. Not crossing—tracing. The border. The line between what I’m allowed and what I want.
“You’re not wet for me right now?”
She shakes her head. Her lip caught between her teeth. Her eyes locked on mine with the intensity of a girl who is daring me to cross the line and praying I do and hoping I don’t, all at the same time.
“What a shame.” I lean down. Press my lips to her neck. One kiss. Soft. Against her pulse. I feel her heartbeat spike under my mouth—the cardiac proof that her words and her body are having two different conversations. “I was really hoping to taste you again.”
The sound she makes—small, involuntary, the whimper—vibrates against my lips.
I pull back. Straighten up. Look down at her—flushed, breathless, her hands gripping the comforter, her eyes glazed with the particular frustration of a girl who was just brought to the edge of something and left there.
“Goodnight, Penelope.” I turn. Walk to the door. Open it. “Sweet dreams.”
The door closes behind me. I stand in the hallway and let the grin spread across my face—slow, real, the grin of a boy who just learned something important:
Iz can kiss her in parking lots. He can hold her hand.
He can tuck her hair behind her ear and whisper in the library and do every goddamn thing he wants.
But when the lights go off and the doors close and it’s just skin and breath and the truth of what a body wants—she’s mine.
She has always been mine. And the whimper she makes for me, she will never make for anyone else.
This isn’t a sprint. It’s a marathon. And I’m playing the long game.
I go to my room. Close the door. Lie on the bed.
Through the wall: a sound. Penny. Not crying. Not talking. Something else. Something that makes my cock twitch and my hands grip the sheets.
She’s thinking about me. Right now. On the other side of this wall. She’s thinking about my hand on her thigh and my mouth on her neck and the words I said and she’s—
I press my forehead to the pillow. Breathe.
The discipline of a boy who is learning—slowly, painfully, one night at a time—that wanting someone and taking them are not the same thing.
That the space between desire and action is where respect lives.
That the boy who deserves Penny MacHale is the one who can lie in the dark and hear her and stay on his side of the wall.
The long game. The patience I never learned from Lucian because Lucian doesn’t have patience. The patience I’m learning from Gideon, who waited for Alice. From Darla, who waits for every patient. From the program that says “one day at a time” and means it.
One day at a time. One night at a time. One wall at a time.
I’m coming for you, Penny. Not to take. To earn. And when I get there—when I’ve done the work and proven I’m not my father and earned the right to say the word “forever” again—I will put my hands on you in the light, in front of everyone, and I will not pull away.
But not yet. Not tonight. Tonight, I stay on my side of the wall. And that’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.