Chapter 14 Catherine #5
“You looked so good in those stands,” he says. Low. Just for me, even though Penny is three feet away. “In my name. Catching my kiss. I almost missed a shot in the third because I looked up and saw you in this sweatshirt and my brain just stopped.”
“You scored four goals.”
“Would have been six without the distraction.” His thumb traces my jaw.
The touch is light but it goes through me like current.
We’ve been together for—what? Days? And I still don’t know what to do with the way my body responds to his.
It’s too much and not enough and completely terrifying and I wouldn’t change a second of it.
“I have plans for tonight,” he murmurs against my ear. “Plans that involve this sweatshirt. And nothing else.”
My breath catches. “Kaiden. Penny is literally right there.”
“I am in fact right here,” Penny confirms at full volume. “Absorbing every word. Processing. Possibly traumatized.”
Kaiden doesn’t move. Doesn’t break eye contact with me. “Penny. Leave.”
“I was here first.”
“It’s my car.”
“She’s my best friend.”
“She’s wearing my name on her back.”
Penny opens her mouth. Closes it. Looks at me. “He’s got me there.”
I laugh—real, full-body, the kind that uses my whole chest. The kind I didn’t think I’d produce today after the kitchen and the fight. But here I am. In a parking lot. Between my best friend and a boy who’s whispering dirty things while his hair drips onto my face.
Penny pushes off the car. “Fine. X is hosting. I’ll see you there.” She points at Kaiden. “Take care of her or I key the Skyline.”
“Touch my car and I end you, MacHale.”
“Love you too, Monaghan. Always have.” She says it casually—the “love you” of a girl who has known this boy since before either of them could walk, who has watched him grow from the sweet kid with daisies into the dark king of Edgewood and still sees both versions when she looks at him.
She hugs me. Quick, fierce. Whispers: “Eleven. Never living it down.”
She walks away. I watch Xander watch her go. Two seconds. Three. He catches himself, swears under his breath, and heads for his car. Kaiden watches the whole Xander-Penny thing with the expression of someone who has been watching it for years and has given up trying to intervene.
“They need to just fuck already,” he says.
“Kaiden.”
“What? Everybody’s thinking it.”
“It’s more complicated than that and you know it.”
“Yeah.” His expression shifts—the humor dropping into something more private. “Yeah, I know.”
He turns back to me. Both hands on my hips. Presses me against the Skyline. His body flush against mine, his mouth finding my ear.
“Now. Where were we.”
“In a public parking lot.”
“Tinted windows.” He opens the passenger door. “Get in the car, Cat. Before the tinted windows become the only thing between us and an audience.”
I get in. He walks around. Gets in. Starts the engine. The RB26 fills the cabin with that deep mechanical pulse I’ve started associating with safety and sex and the particular frequency of Kaiden’s voice in the dark.
He pulls out. Reaches for my hand on the console. Our fingers lace. His thumb traces circles on my knuckle—a small, absent gesture, the kind of thing a person does without thinking, and the unconsciousness of it is more intimate than anything deliberate could be.
We’re still figuring this out. Still awkward in the spaces between the intensity—the silences that aren’t comfortable yet, the way we don’t always know where to look, the gap between what our bodies do naturally and what our brains are still catching up to.
We’re not a polished couple. We’re two people who’ve been together for days and apart for years and somewhere in between those two timelines is whatever we’re building.
But his hand is in mine and the road is ahead and for a few minutes—for the length of a drive between a lacrosse field and a party—nothing is wrong.
The fight is at home. The bandages are under my sleeves.
The sealed records are sealed. And I’m in a car with a boy who scored four goals and held my face like I was the trophy.
The world outside the tinted windows can wait.
Xander’s house is the kind of place that proves money doesn’t buy taste but it does buy square footage.
Six thousand square feet of colonial architecture, absent father, mother in and out of institutions, and a pool house that has been the unofficial headquarters of the Elite Five since freshman year.
Tonight the main house is open, and it’s packed.
The music is loud enough to feel in my teeth—bass reverberating through the hardwood floors, the particular sonic assault of a playlist curated by someone who understands that a party’s heartbeat is its speakers.
Students from Edgewood and at least two neighboring schools fill the first floor, spilling onto the back patio and into the kitchen, where someone has set up a bar that would make a bartender weep.
Penny and I arrived an hour ago. She’s on her third drink and her first argument with the DJ about the playlist. Kaiden found me within thirty seconds of walking through the door—his hand on my waist from behind, his mouth at my ear saying “found you” like I was hiding, which I wasn’t, but the possessiveness of it still sent a current through my entire body.
We’ve been dancing. Or whatever you call what we’re doing—his chest against my back, his hands on my hips, my body moving against his to a beat that’s too slow for the way we’re grinding.
The bass is in my ribs. His breath is on my neck.
The room is dark and packed and nobody’s paying attention to us, which means I can let the ice princess take a break and just be a girl at a party with a boy’s hands on her body.
Kaiden takes a hit from the joint Iz passes him.
Turns me around. Cups my face with one hand, tilts my chin up, and when he kisses me, the smoke passes from his mouth to mine—warm, slow, intimate in a way that has nothing to do with the weed and everything to do with the shared breath.
I inhale. Hold. Exhale against his lips, and his eyes go dark and his grip on my hip tightens.
“Again,” I say.
He grins. Takes another hit. Kisses me again. The smoke curls between us when we separate, and the room blurs pleasantly at the edges.
Across the floor, Penny is dancing. Not alone.
Xander has materialized beside her the way he always does—not announcing himself, just appearing in her orbit like his body has a gravitational default.
They’re not touching. There’s a deliberate three inches of space between them that they’re both maintaining with the careful precision of two people who know exactly what would happen if they closed the gap.
But they’re moving to the same beat. Penny’s hips and Xander’s hips finding the same rhythm without looking at each other, the physical synchronization of two bodies that grew up in the same rooms at the same parties to the same music and learned each other’s rhythms before they learned anything else.
“How long has that been going on?” I ask Kaiden, nodding toward them.
“The dancing or the denial?”
“Both.”
“The dancing, since they were about twelve. The denial, about the same.” He watches them with the expression of someone who’s been watching this for years.
“Something happened between them the summer before freshman year. I don’t know what.
X won’t talk about it. Penny definitely won’t.
But whatever it was, it broke something, and they’ve been circling each other ever since. Close enough to touch. Never touching.”
“That sounds exhausting.”
“It’s brutal. They’re the smartest people I know, and they’re both idiots about this.”
As if to prove his point, Penny’s hand brushes X’s arm. Both of them freeze. The three inches become six. The music keeps going. They keep dancing. Separately now. The gap between them charged with something visible.
Iz drops into the space beside us, drink in hand. “Update: they touched. Estimated recovery time: forty-five minutes of aggressive avoidance.”
Danny appears on the other side. “Forty-five is generous. Last time it was the rest of the night.”
Ryan, from somewhere behind us: “I’ve got a spreadsheet tracking these incidents. We’re at seventeen accidental touches this semester. Average avoidance period: fifty-two minutes.”
“You have a spreadsheet?” I ask.
“I have a spreadsheet for everything. Knowledge is power, Cat.”
I laugh. Kaiden pulls me back against him. The song changes—heavier, slower, the kind of beat that exists specifically for the purpose of bodies pressed together in dark rooms. His mouth finds my ear.
“Stop paying attention to them. Pay attention to me.”
I turn in his arms. Loop my hands around his neck. His hands slide to the small of my back, pulling me flush, and we move together in the dark with his forehead pressed to mine and his eyes on my eyes and the rest of the party disappearing into noise and shadow.
This is new. The public version of us. We’ve done the dark—his bedroom, my bedroom, the car, the woods.
But this—being together in a room full of people, touching each other while music plays and drinks pour and Iz makes jokes three feet away—this is a different kind of intimacy.
The kind that says: we exist outside of crisis.
We exist outside of trauma and confessions and two a.m. balconies.
We can just…be. In a room. Together. Normal.
I press my face into his neck and breathe him in—cologne and smoke and the clean-laundry smell of his long-sleeve—and for a few minutes, the world is exactly the size of this boy’s arms.
The disruption starts at the front door.