Chapter 12 - Catherine #6
I notice when he takes the wrong turn at the stone bridge—left instead of right, toward the back roads that wind through the kind of New England woods you see in postcards.
Birch and oak, mostly stripped, the branches interlocking overhead like the ribs of something ancient.
The occasional pine still holding its needles, dark green against the grey. The road narrows. The light dims.
“Where are we going?”
“I need to not be anywhere near that school for a while.”
The tension is still in his jaw. The locker. The word. The photos. He’s been holding it all day—the same way I hold things, the same operating system: perform until the audience leaves. The audience has left. Whatever’s been compressed is starting to expand.
He turns off the main road onto a dirt track.
Gravel crunches under the tires. The trees close in—dense, old-growth, the kind of woods where the undergrowth is thick enough that you can’t see more than twenty feet in any direction.
He pulls into a clearing beside a collapsed stone wall—the remnants of some colonial-era property line, now just granite and moss and the patient architecture of decay.
He parks. Kills the engine. The silence of the woods rushes in—total, immersive, the sound of wind in bare branches and nothing else.
We sit. He stares through the windshield. Hands on the wheel. Knuckles white.
“That word,” he says. “On your locker.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m going to find who did it.”
“Kaiden. Look at me.”
He turns. The version of him that scares other people is right there—dark eyes, tight jaw, the coiled energy of a boy who channels his pain into his fists and is running out of acceptable targets.
It doesn’t scare me. It never has. And I’ve stopped pretending that’s normal.
“You kissed me in front of the whole school today,” I say. “Twice.”
“Yeah.”
“We said we weren’t naming this.”
“I know what we said.”
“So what was that? In the parking lot.”
His hand tightens on the wheel. “That guy looked at you. The way he looked at you—like he’d seen—” He stops.
Exhales through his nose. “I didn’t decide to do it.
My body just moved. The same way it moved in the hallway when Jon walked past. I see someone look at you like that and something in me just… takes over.”
“That’s terrifying, Kaiden.”
“I know.”
“It shouldn’t feel good that you did it.”
“But it does.” Not a question.
“Yeah.” I look at my hands in my lap. “It does. And I don’t know what that says about me.”
“It says you’re tired of people looking at you like you’re available for consumption. And someone finally stood in front of you and said ‘no.’”
The air in the car shifts. Thickens. The conversation has stripped away the last pretense—that this is casual, manageable, a thing we can keep in a box and take out when it’s convenient. It’s not. It’s enormous. It’s consuming. It’s the most terrifying and alive I’ve felt in five years.
He reaches across the console. His hand finds the back of my neck. Pulls me toward him. Kisses me—rough, his teeth on my bottom lip, his fingers tight in my hair. I grab the front of his shirt and pull, and the center console is between us, and it’s not enough, it’s nowhere near enough.
“Get over here,” he says against my mouth. Low. A command.
I climb across the console. Knees bracket his hips. My skirt rides up. The steering wheel presses into my lower back. The space is small and his body is big and the confined dimensions of a Japanese sports car force us together in a way that makes every point of contact feel deliberate.
His hands slide up my thighs. Slow. His thumbs pressing into the soft skin hard enough that I know I’ll see the marks tomorrow, and I want them there. Evidence. Proof of a choice I made.
“You have no idea what today has done to me,” he says.
His voice is rough. Stripped of every performance.
“Watching you in that hallway—telling Jon you’ve killed a man without blinking.
Correcting Burke’s math while he was trying to humiliate you.
Standing in front of that locker like it couldn’t touch you.
Cat, you are the most dangerous person in that building. And nobody knows it but me.”
His hand wraps around my throat. I nod. His fingers close—firm, measured, the pressure that empties my brain of everything except the feeling of being held in place by someone who could hurt me and is choosing not to.
“This is mine,” he says. Not asking. “This body. These sounds you make. Every boy who looked at those photos saw skin. They don’t know what these scars mean. They don’t know what you survived to have them. They don’t know what it sounds like when you say my name.”
The words should scare me. They should send me back to the book club, to Jack, to “you’re mine” used as a cage.
They don’t. Because Kaiden’s “mine” sounds like a perimeter. A border drawn around something precious by a boy who knows what it’s like to have his body taken from him. “Nobody touches this but me—and only because you let me.”
I pull his shirt open. Buttons scatter. My mouth on his neck, his collarbone, the tattoo over his heart. He groans—deep, vibrating through his chest into my lips.
His hands find my underwear. Push them aside. His fingers slide against me and my whole body jerks.
“So wet,” he murmurs against my ear. “All day? Sitting next to me in class like this?”
“Shut up.”
“Answer me.” His fingers circle. Slow. “Were you like this when I pulled your hair in Burke’s class?”
“Yes.”
“Were you like this when I kissed you against the car?”
“Yes.” Barely a word. His fingers are making coherent speech a structural impossibility.
“Good girl.”
The praise hits somewhere deep—somewhere that should recoil and instead blooms. He feels my response and his smile against my neck is dark and devastating.
“You like that,” he says. Not asking. Knowing. “My good girl. The girl who kills men and corrects teachers and comes apart on my hand in the front seat of my car.”
His fingers curl inside me and his thumb finds my clit and the combination sends a bolt through my body that makes my thighs clamp. I’m close—embarrassingly fast, devastatingly fast—and he knows.
“Not yet.” He pulls his hand away. I make a sound that I will deny making under oath. “Patience, Cat.”
He reaches between us. Unbuckles. Unzips. I feel him against me—hard, hot against my thigh—and my body responds with a desperation that has no dignity.
I rise up on my knees. Position myself. Start to sink down—and realize at the exact same moment he does.
No condom.
I freeze. He freezes. We’re right there—the tip of him barely inside me, the contact so raw and immediate that my brain whites out for a second.
“Fuck,” he says. His voice is wrecked. “Fuck—Cat—I don’t have—”
“I know.” I should pull up. Should stop. Every rational thought in my head is screaming to stop.
“Just—” He swallows. His hands grip my hips. Not moving me. Holding. “Just let me feel you for a second. Like this. Just—one second.”
One second. His eyes on mine. The heat of him right there, barely inside, the raw contact of skin on skin with nothing between us.
My body is shaking. His is too. The one second stretches into two, three, and neither of us moves and neither of us pulls away and the intensity of just “feeling” is more overwhelming than anything we’ve done fully.
I shift. Just slightly. A tiny, involuntary roll of my hips that takes him deeper by an inch, and the sound he makes—guttural, broken, his head falling back against the headrest—undoes something in me.
“Cat—we should—”
“It feels too good.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. It sounds like someone who has stopped listening to rational thought entirely. “Kaid, it feels—I can’t—”
I sink down another inch. His hands tighten on my hips—not stopping me, not pushing me, just holding on like a person losing their grip on something.
“Please tell me you’re on something,” he says. His voice is desperate. Begging. Kaiden Monaghan—the king, the bully, the boy who commands rooms—is begging. “Please, Cat—fuck, that feels—please tell me—”
“IUD.”
His entire body sags with relief. His forehead drops to my collarbone.
“Thank fuck.”
“Got it last year. You’re welcome.”
“I could kiss your gynecologist.”
“Don’t make it weird.”
He laughs—breathless, disbelieving, his face pressed to my chest—and then his hands tighten on my hips and he pulls me down the rest of the way and we both stop laughing.
The feeling—the full, unfiltered contact, nothing between us—is staggering. My mouth falls open. His jaw locks. We hold there for a moment, processing, adjusting, both of us trying to survive the intensity without moving because moving might end this before it starts.
Then he moves. And I lose the ability to think.
His hands grip my hips and set the pace—slow at first, achingly slow, pulling me up and bringing me back down with a controlled strength that makes my breath come in sharp, involuntary gasps.
The confined space forces our movements tight, controlled, every roll of my hips a negotiation with the steering wheel and the seat and the dimensions of a car that was built for speed and is currently being used for something entirely different.
“Look at me,” he says. “When I’m inside you, you don’t close your eyes. Stay with me.”
I look. His eyes are nearly black. The hand that was on my hip comes to my face—thumb against my cheekbone, holding my gaze.
“You feel incredible,” he says. Raw. “Every time—every fucking time—it gets better. You’re ruining me for anything else, Cat. You know that? Nothing is ever going to feel like this again.”
His other hand wraps around my throat. I nod. He squeezes. My vision narrows to the dark of his eyes and the pressure of his hand and the feeling of him inside me with nothing in between, and the intimacy of it—the rawness, the trust it takes to do this without a barrier—makes my eyes sting.
“Faster,” I say. “Kaid—please—”
He drives up into me. Harder. His hands guiding my hips in a rhythm that’s not gentle anymore—the controlled restraint cracking, the raw thing underneath taking over. The Skyline’s suspension creaks. The leather protests. The windows fog.
“That’s it,” he says against my ear. Dark. Possessive. The voice that should terrify me and instead makes me come alive. “Take it. Take everything you need from me. I want to feel you fall apart—no barriers, nothing between us, just you. Show me what you look like when you let go completely.”
I’m close. The coil of heat tightening, the pressure building from where we’re connected outward through my entire body. His thumb finds my clit and I gasp—a sharp, involuntary sound—
“Say my name when you come,” he says. “I want to hear it. I want the trees to hear it. I want everything outside this car to know who’s making you feel like this.”
The words tip me over. I break—his name on my lips, my body clenching around him, my back arching until my head hits the steering wheel and I don’t care, I can’t care, the intensity is a whiteout and I’m lost in it.
He follows. I feel it—the way his whole body goes rigid, his hips driving up one final time, a groan muffled against my neck that vibrates through my collarbones and into my chest. His arms lock around me like he’s afraid I’ll evaporate.
We stay. Tangled. Breathing. The windows are completely opaque. The world outside the car has ceased to exist.
His lips find my collarbone. Soft now. The gentleness that comes after—the version of Kaiden only I get to see. The boy under the king.
“You’re going to destroy me,” he says against my skin.
“Promise?”
He laughs into my neck and I feel it in my ribs.
I climb back to my seat. We put ourselves back together in the small, quiet way of two people who just did something enormous in a confined space and are now confronting the logistics of buttons and zippers.
He starts the engine. The defogger hums. The windshield clears in patches—bare branches, grey sky, stone wall, the woods coming back into focus like a photograph developing.
His hand finds mine on the console. Our fingers lace.
“We said we weren’t naming this,” he says.
“You kissed me against your car in front of the entire school and then called me yours in the front seat. I think we named it.”
He squeezes my hand. “Yeah. I think we did.”
He pulls onto the road. Back through the woods. Back toward the neighborhood, the houses, the lives we lead outside of dark rooms and fogged-up cars.
“Whatever this is,” he says. “We figure it out together. Not just you carrying it. Not just me crashing through it.”
I look at him. At the boy who bullied me and held me and kissed every scar on my body and just fogged up the windows of his Skyline in the woods outside Edgewood.
“Together.”
He pulls into my driveway. Parks. We sit for a moment. His thumb runs across my knuckles.
“Cat.”
“Yeah.”
“Today was the worst and best day of my life. And I don’t know how to hold both of those at the same time.”
“Me neither.” I squeeze his hand. “But I’d rather not know with you than not know alone.”
He lifts my hand to his mouth. Kisses my knuckles. Doesn’t say anything, because the gesture says everything.
I get out. Walk to the door. Turn. He’s still there. Engine idling. Watching me get inside.
I close the door. Lean against it. Press my palm to my chest where my heartbeat is doing something arrhythmic and unfamiliar and terrifyingly close to happiness.
I don’t know what we are. But we named it anyway. And the name isn’t a word—it’s a kiss against a car and a boy’s voice in the woods saying “mine” in a way that doesn’t feel like a cage.
It feels like a door opening.
And for the first time, I’m not afraid of what’s on the other side.