Chapter 3 #2
The silence after that is sharp. Catherine’s book slips from her hand and hits the floor. Pennington turns to her, and I watch the whole thing happen in sequence—confusion, suspicion, jealousy.
Good.
That part should satisfy me. It almost does.
“What is he talking about, Catherine?” Pennington asks. “Did you sleep with him?”
She doesn’t look at him. She looks at me and there’s something in her face that makes me feel just a little sick. Not shame. Not panic. Exhaustion. Like she is so fucking tired of men turning her body into a battlefield and then demanding answers about the casualties.
“Yes, Jon,” she says flatly. “I fucked him on this table.”
Pennington’s face twists. “Don’t be sarcastic with me. I’m asking you a question.”
He steps toward her and there it is. That shift. Shoulders squaring. Chest lifting. The start of a move meant to intimidate. Iz told me what happened in the hallway. The grip on her arm. The way she went still, so I stay exactly where I am.
“No, Jonathan,” she says. Calm. Precise. “I did not sleep with Kaiden. He pulled my hair because he’s a fucking child who didn’t get his way. That’s the entire story.”
Pennington glares at me. “I should have you arrested.”
“For what?” I ask. “She didn’t seem to mind.”
The second it leaves my mouth I know it’s wrong. Not because it isn’t true—her body reacted. I felt it. But because I just used her response as a weapon. Against him, in front of her, and that’s a line. One I just bulldozed right over.
Catherine stands. Slowly. Methodically. Book. Notebook. Pens. Bag. Same precise movements she always makes, like order is the only thing keeping her stitched together. When she’s done, she looks at Jon first.
“If you think I’d cheat on you,” she says, “then this relationship has much bigger problems than Kaiden Monaghan.”
Then she looks at me. And when she does, her voice goes colder than his ever could.
“Touch me again and I’ll make you regret it.”
No heat. No dramatics. Just fact. Then she walks out. Straight-backed. Controlled. Not hurrying. Not looking back.
Pennington and I stand there in the silence she leaves behind. He turns to me, and the anger on his face looks thin now. Cheap. Mostly covering fear.
“Leave her alone,” he says. “She’s been through a lot. She doesn’t need this.”
That catches. Not the warning. The wording.
Been through a lot.
Vague on purpose. He knows something. Something real.
“She can handle herself,” I say. “Better than you can.”
“You don’t know anything about her.”
“Neither do you,” I say. “You just think you do because she lets you hold her hand in the hallway.”
He tries to hold my stare. Fails. I leave him in the library and head for the corridor, jaw tight, thoughts mean and sharp and all fucking Catherine. Because now I know two things.
One—Jon hates me enough that getting under her skin gets under his too. And two—
Whatever lives under Catherine O’Farrell’s perfect little mask? It’s colder than mine. And now I want it even more.
I don’t go to my next class. I go to the gym.
I change into shorts and a t-shirt and grab my stick from the equipment room, where everything smells like rubber, old sweat, and that fake chemical bullshit they use to pretend teenage boys aren’t disgusting.
It’s grounding. Simple. Physical. The kind of real that doesn’t ask me to think too hard.
The track is empty this time of day, and that’s exactly how I like it.
I run. Not jog. Not some soft, therapeutic bullshit.
I run until my lungs feel flayed open and my legs start shaking under me.
Stick in hand, ball in the pocket, running drills so hard and fast my body stops feeling like a body and turns into pure instinct.
Turn. Cut. Sprint. Shoot. Again. Again. Again.
The sky shifts while I’m at it. Afternoon blue bleeding into that ugly, bruised New England grey that always looks like the world got hit too hard and never recovered right.
I keep going because if I stop, I think. And if I think, I end up right back in that fucking library with my hand in Catherine O’Farrell’s hair, with Pennington’s smug little face under my forearm, with that dark, ugly thing in my chest clawing to get out.
I run because it’s the only respectable excuse I’ve got for the violence that lives under my skin.
The thing that wanted to put Jonathan through the table instead of just pinning him to it.
The thing that wanted to keep its fist wrapped in that ponytail and tug until she either slapped me or moaned again.
The thing that’s been inside me since I was a kid and realized not everyone’s head is this loud.
This black, churning, mean fucking energy that never shuts off.
My father channels his into politics. My mother channels hers into charity events, expensive wine, and pretending everything in this town is fixable with a tasteful floral arrangement. I channel mine into lacrosse, fights, and making people feel small.
So far, it’s been working out great.
I stop at the far end of the track and brace my hands on my knees, sucking in air like I’m trying to drag the whole damn sky into my lungs. Sweat drips off my jaw. My chest burns. My forearms ache. And still—
There she is. Again. Always. Replay.
That tiny hitch in her breathing when I grabbed her hair. The goosebumps breaking over her skin. The way her eyes locked on mine instead of darting away like everyone else’s do. The way she said I was nothing.
Not hysterical. Not emotional. Just cold enough to skin me alive with it.
And then the look on her face when Pennington opened his mouth and made her body his business in front of me. That look won’t leave me the fuck alone.
Tired. Older than she should be. Like she’s already exhausted by men before we’ve even finished high school.
I drag a hand down my face and straighten up slowly. There is something genuinely fucked up about me. And I don’t mean the fake rich-kid darkness everyone at Edgewood likes to cosplay because they think brooding makes them interesting.
I mean something deeper. Structural. Like somebody wired my brain wrong and then never bothered fixing it.
Because I’m standing alone on a track in the dark, body wrecked, adrenaline still punching through my bloodstream, and all I can think about is the sound Catherine made when I tugged that ponytail. That tiny, involuntary catch.
Fuck.
I want to hear it again. She told me not to touch her, I know. She meant it, I know that too. That’s the problem. If she’d been like every other girl in this school—easy smile, quick pulse, fake outrage, real curiosity—I would’ve been over it by dinner. But she’s not.
Catherine O’Farrell isn’t cold. She isn’t stuck-up. She isn’t some pristine little ice princess too good for everybody else.
She’s controlled. Tightly. Brutally. Deliberately controlled. And control like that doesn’t come from being well-bred or ambitious or smarter than everyone in the room.
It comes from necessity. It comes from learning the hard way that if you don’t keep a death grip on yourself, something bad happens. Something you can’t undo.
I know that because I’ve built the same kind of walls. Mine are meaner. Ugier. Built out of different shit.
But I know them when I see them and that’s the thing I can’t stop circling back to. It was never really about breaking her.
Okay, that’s a lie.
Part of it absolutely is. I’m good at breaking things. People. Rules. Bones, if necessary. But that’s not all this is. The question I can’t get away from isn’t whether I can crack her. It’s why the fuck I want to so badly.
Because I want to see what she’s hiding? Because I want to drag something real out of her and prove she bleeds like everyone else? Or because some rotten, buried part of me is terrified that whatever’s behind her eyes is going to look too much like what’s behind mine?
I hate that question. I hate that I even asked it.
The floodlights kick on over the field, flooding the empty track in sterile white and I head back inside. Shower, change, drive home with the windows up and the engine of the Skyline growling loud enough that I don’t have to hear myself think.
Doesn’t help. Nothing fucking helps.
Catherine O’Farrell is a problem. She’s also the most interesting person I’ve met in a long time. And I don’t do interest.
I don’t do curiosity. I don’t do harmless little crushes. I get fixated. I get mean. I get obsessed. And judging by the fact that I’m still thinking about the feel of her hair wrapped around my fist?
I’m already way too fucking deep.