Chapter 13 Kaiden #2
“Garrett was supposed to just hold me. Keep the Monaghan kid in a room. But Garrett wasn’t right. Hadn’t been for a long time. His family knew—everybody knew—they just covered it the way rich families cover everything. So the holding turned into something else.”
Another drag. My hand is steady. That surprises me.
“He didn’t do what Jack did to you. Not that. But he beat me. Burned me with cigarettes. Used a knife on my back—that’s what’s under the tattoos. Most of them.” I stare at the yard. “And he filmed it. All of it. And then he’d watch the footage while he…”
I don’t finish. Don’t need to. Cat’s hand finds mine under the blanket and squeezes so hard I feel bone.
“Three days. The police found me in a parking garage after my dad traced a call. He carried me out. I couldn’t walk.
” My voice snags. I clear it. “Garrett got shipped to Switzerland. His father bought everyone off. NDAs. Settlements. Sealed tighter than your records. And Jon—Jon defended him. Told people at school I disappeared for attention. That I was lying.”
“That’s why you hate him.”
“That’s one of the reasons I hate him. And that’s why he pushed to be your boyfriend. The Penningtons have been trying to get their claws into the O’Farrells since you moved here. Your father’s political rise, your mother’s connections. Jon was the point of entry.”
Cat is quiet for a while. The joint has burned halfway down. She takes another drag—smoother now, like she’s been doing it for years.
“So both of us,” she says. “Hurt by people who were supposed to be trusted. Families that buried it. Bodies that carry it—your back, my arms.”
“Yeah.”
“What a pair.”
“Disaster meets catastrophe.”
“At least we’re on-brand.”
She tells me more about Jack. Not the worst parts—she’s already given those.
The other parts. How his book recommendations were genuinely great.
How he could talk about literature in a way that made a lonely twelve-year-old feel seen.
How the kindness was real, and that was the cruelest part—because losing it felt like losing something precious instead of escaping something terrible.
I tell her about the nightmares. The basement. The locked door. Garrett’s laugh. How the dreams changed—less about the room, more about the feeling. Trapped. No control. Someone bigger deciding what happens to your body.
“That’s why you grab people,” she says. Not a question. “Reclaiming control. If your hands are the ones holding, you’re not the one being held.”
“When did you get your psychology degree?”
“Same place you got yours—the school of being fucked up and forced to analyze it.”
I snort. She grins—loose, warm, slightly lopsided from the weed. She looks, for the first time since she climbed through my balcony, like a seventeen-year-old girl instead of a soldier on leave.
She runs her finger over the tattoo on my forearm. The vine. The thorns. The one that covers the first scar. “Your dad took you to get this?”
“Fifteen. He sat in the shop and held my hand for the first one, which is embarrassing and also the best thing he’s ever done.”
“That’s not embarrassing. That’s beautiful.”
“Don’t tell him. He’ll cry. He’s a secret crier.”
“Callum Monaghan. Secret crier. The campaign slogan writes itself.”
I laugh—too loud, way too loud for two-something a.m. on a balcony.
She clamps her hand over my mouth and we’re both laughing now, the kind of laughter that feeds on itself, the kind where you’re trying to stop and the trying makes it worse.
I’m shaking with it. She’s shaking with it.
The blanket slips off her shoulders and neither of us reaches for it because we’re too busy being idiots on a balcony at an hour when serious people are asleep.
“Shut up!” she hisses through her own laughter. “Kaiden! Your parents—”
“You shut up! You’re louder than me!”
“I am not—”
“You literally just snorted. Like a pig. On my balcony.”
“I did not snort—”
She snorts again. We both lose it. Full, stupid, teenage laughter that has no business existing in the same night as bloody wrists and basement confessions but exists anyway because that’s how people work.
The worst and best things sit right next to each other, and sometimes you laugh on a balcony at two a.m. because the alternative is drowning.
The laughter fades into something quieter. She tucks her face into my neck. I pull the blanket back up around us. The joint has gone out. I don’t relight it.
“This is nice,” she says. Muffled. “Why is it nice? We just spent an hour talking about the worst things. That shouldn’t be nice.”
“Maybe it’s nice because we said them out loud and nothing collapsed.”
She pulls back. Looks at me. Her eyes are soft—the weed and the honesty and the cold air stripping the last of the armor.
I kiss her. Slow. The kind that’s not going anywhere—no escalation, no agenda, just mouths together because they want to be and we’re too tired and too honest and too stoned to pretend otherwise.
She hums against my lips. Pulls back. Kisses my jaw. My neck. The spot below my ear.
“We should go inside,” I say. “You need sleep.”
“I’m warm.”
“You’re stoned and hypothermic. Inside, Cat.”
She grumbles but lets me pull her up. I steer us inside, close the balcony door, and we crawl into bed. Her back to my chest. My arm over her waist. The same configuration our bodies have memorized. No sex. Just holding.
“I’ll set an alarm,” I say. “Early. You can sneak back before anyone’s up.”
“Your dad has security cameras.”
“The cameras face the front of the house. The balcony is a blind spot. How do you think I’ve been getting away with smoking out there for two years?”
She laughs. Quiet this time. A tired laugh. A going-to-sleep laugh. “Kaid?”
“Yeah.”
“Thank you for not freaking out.”
“I absolutely freaked out.”
“You freaked out quietly. That counts.”
I press my face into her hair. She smells like my shampoo from the shower. Underneath it, her.
She falls asleep first. I hold her and I don’t sleep—not because of insomnia, but because I want to be awake for this. The girl who showed up bleeding is breathing steadily with her hand curled around mine and she’s safe and I want to be conscious for every second of that.
I fall asleep eventually. The quietest my head has been in six years.
Morning light through the curtains. Thin October sun. Cat is still asleep against my chest. Her bandaged wrists rest on my arm. In sleep, every defense drops—the ice, the composure, the architecture. Just a face. Young. Tired.
A knock. My father’s voice. Not angry. Tired. The tiredness of a parent who has been awake since the security cameras caught a girl climbing the trellis.
“Kaiden. I know she’s there.”
The trellis. Not the balcony. The cameras caught the trellis.
Cat’s eyes fly open. She scrambles upright—checking wrists, pulling sleeves down, running the concealment protocols.
“Hey,” I say. “It’s fine.”
“Kaiden. Door. Now.”
I open it. My father is in his bathrobe, coffee in hand, the expression of a man managing a situation.
“Saw her on the cameras at two-thirteen. Climbing the trellis, which we’re having removed this week.” He pauses. “I let it go because I could hear you both talking on the balcony and I assumed you were handling it. I called her parents. They know she’s here.”
He pushes the door wider. Sees Cat. Sees the bandages, visible where the t-shirt sleeves are too short. His eyes hold on them. The parental annoyance shifts into the deeper thing.
“Downstairs. Both of you. Your mother’s cooking.”
He heads down the hall. Cat looks at me like she’s calculating the distance to the balcony door.
“Breathe,” I say. “He likes you more than me. You’re fine.”
Downstairs. My mother is at the stove—pancakes, eggs, bacon. My father is at the island with his newspaper, his version of normalcy. Cat hovers in the doorway. I know what she’s feeling—the instinct to shrink, to apologize, to take up less space.
My mother turns. Sees Cat. Sees the bandages. Does not react to the bandages. Just smiles. “Morning, sweetheart. Pancakes or waffles?”
“Um. Pancakes. Thank you, Mrs.—”
“Saoirse. Sit.”
My father folds his newspaper. “I’m going to say this once, to both of you.
” Sip of coffee. “I understand you’re going through difficult things.
Both of you. I understand you’ve found comfort in each other.
But you’re eighteen. You’re neighbors. And I can’t have you climbing the trellis at two a.m.”
He looks at me. “We have a front door.” Then at Cat. Softer. “You’re always welcome here, Catherine. Always. But I need to know you’re here. Not for control. For safety. I can’t protect what I don’t know about.”
Cat nods. “Yes sir. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. Front door. That’s all.” He looks at the ceiling. Then at me. “Are you being responsible?”
I think about yesterday. The woods. No condom. “Just let me feel you for a second.” The IUD. I swallow. “Yes sir.”
He notices something in my face. Chooses not to pursue it. Small mercies. My mother sets a plate in front of Cat. Three pancakes, melting butter, maple syrup. Cat stares at it like a gift.
“Eat,” Saoirse says. “You haven’t eaten since yesterday and I can tell.”
Cat eats. Slowly, then faster. My mother watches with the satisfaction of a woman who believes every crisis starts and ends in the kitchen.
My father reads his paper. My mother cooks. Cat and I sit side by side. The kitchen warms. The awkwardness fades enough that Cat laughs at my mother’s story about my father burning toast on their first date, and my father snorts when Cat identifies his car’s engine by sound from inside the house.
Twenty minutes of something that functions. After breakfast, my mother pulls me aside in the hallway.
“Her pajamas are in the dryer. I washed them this morning. There was—” She pauses. “Blood on thm.”