Chapter 14 Catherine #8
Kaiden catches them one-handed. Nods.
I look around the room. At Iz on the couch with his hand on his ribs.
At Danny beside him, a silent sentinel. At Ryan heading for the pool house with his laptop under his arm.
At Xander, standing in the middle of his own home, the boy who fixes broken lamps and opens his doors and says “stay” like it’s the simplest word in the world.
“Where’s Penny?” I ask.
Xander’s expression does something complicated. “Upstairs. Third door on the left. She’s asleep.”
“Did you—”
“I carried her up after…after the thing. She was shaking. I put her in the guest room with a blanket and water. She was out in five minutes.”
His voice is careful. Measured. The voice of a boy reporting facts without commentary, because the commentary would require acknowledging things he’s not ready to acknowledge.
“Thank you, X,” I say.
He nods. Turns away. The back of his neck is red.
Iz catches my eye from the couch. Mouths: “fifty-two minutes.” The spreadsheet. I almost laugh.
Kaiden tugs my hand. “Come on.”
I follow him toward the stairs. Stop. Turn back to the room. “Guys.”
Four faces turn toward me. Iz on the couch. Danny beside him. Ryan in the doorway. Xander by the lamp.
“Thank you. For tonight. For…all of it.”
Iz grins. “You literally beat a man unconscious in our living room. We should be thanking you. Best party entertainment we’ve ever had.”
“Technically she didn’t knock him unconscious,” Danny says. “He was conscious when we dragged him out. Crying, but conscious.”
“Details.” Iz waves his hand. “The point stands. You’re one of us now, Cat. Whether you like it or not.”
The words land somewhere unexpected. Not in my brain—in my chest. The place where the loneliness lives. The place that’s been empty since I was twelve, since Jack taught me that connection is a trap and people who say “you’re one of us” always want something in return.
These boys don’t want anything. They’re sitting in a trashed living room at midnight, bruised and tired and slightly drunk, and they’re telling me I belong.
Not because I earned it. Not because I’m Kaiden’s.
Because I showed up bleeding to their friend’s house and they cleaned me up and watched me fight and stayed, and apparently that’s enough.
“Whether I like it or not,” I repeat.
“Non-negotiable,” Ryan confirms from the doorway. “I’ve already added you to the group chat. You’re in the spreadsheet. There’s no opt-out clause.”
“You have a spreadsheet for friends?”
“I have a spreadsheet for everything, Cat. We’ve been over this.”
I smile. Small. Real. The kind that happens when you’re too tired to perform and what’s left is just the truth.
“Goodnight, guys.”
A chorus of “nights” from the room—Iz’s loud, Danny’s quiet, Ryan’s distracted, Xander’s soft. I follow Kaiden up the stairs.
The room at the end of the hall is a guest room that’s nicer than most people’s master bedrooms—queen bed, en suite bathroom, a window that looks out over the back lawn where the pool glows blue in the dark.
Xander keeps his guest rooms stocked the way other people keep hotel rooms—clean towels, fresh soap, the implicit understanding that someone might need a place to crash at any time.
Kaiden closes the door. The click of the latch seals us into something quiet and separate from the chaos downstairs. The noise of the night—the fight, the screaming, the blood, Jon’s words about my mother—is still there, but the room holds it at a distance, the way a harbor holds the ocean back.
I sit on the edge of the bed. My hands are still shaking. Not from fear—from the residual adrenaline, the chemical tail end of violence, the particular tremor that follows a fight the way aftershocks follow an earthquake.
Kaiden sits beside me. Not touching. Giving me space to be whatever I need to be.
“My mother,” I say. “The Penningtons are blackmailing her.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s why she’s been acting like—the phone calls, the flip-flopping, the way she keeps pushing Jon on me. She’s not choosing them. She’s being held.”
“We’ll tell my dad. Tomorrow. He’ll know what to do.”
“Tomorrow.” I press my palms against my eyes. “Tonight I just need to not think about it.”
“Then don’t.”
He reaches for the hem of the sweatshirt. Pulls it up slowly. He slides it off my shoulders, and underneath is the black t-shirt I put on in Penny’s car this morning—fitted, long-sleeved, nothing underneath it but skin and bandages.
He folds the sweatshirt. Sets it on the nightstand. The care he takes with it—his name on it, the thing I wore all day, the fabric that smells like both of us now—is unexpectedly tender.
“You wore it all day,” he says. Not a question. A fact he’s turning over.
“All day. The game. The party. The fight.”
“You beat a man bloody wearing my name on your back.”
“Is that a problem?”
He looks at me. The expression on his face is something I’m still learning to read—not the smirk, not the hunger, not the king. Something underneath all of it. Bare and terrified and trying very hard not to say a word that’s too big for a relationship that’s existed for days.
“No,” he says. “That’s not a problem.”
He stands. Goes to the bathroom. Comes back with a damp washcloth. Sits on the floor in front of me—on the floor, looking up—and takes my hand. Gently. Turns it over. The scraped knuckles, the crusted blood, the bruise forming across my first two fingers.
He cleans my hand. Slow. Careful. The same way he cleaned my wrists last night in his bathroom—the same tenderness applied to a different kind of wound.
These aren’t cuts I gave myself. These are cuts I gave someone else.
But Kaiden treats them with the same attention, the same gravity, because to him damage is damage and it all deserves to be cleaned.
“You hit hard,” he says.
“I grew up with a father who taught me to throw a punch when I was nine.”
“Remind me to thank Thomas.”
The ghost of a smile. Both of us. He finishes. Sets the cloth aside. Stays on the floor, kneeling, his hands around mine. Looking up at me.
“Cat.”
“Yeah.”
“Today was—” He stops. Starts again. “You fought with your parents. You told Penny everything. You watched me play a lacrosse game. You wore my sweatshirt in a stadium. You danced with me at a party. You found out your mother is being blackmailed. You beat Jonathan Pennington’s face in.
And now you’re sitting on a bed in Xander’s guest room at midnight with blood on your hands. ”
“When you list it like that, it sounds exhausting.”
“It is exhausting. It’s the most exhausting day I’ve ever watched someone survive. And you’re still sitting up. Still talking. Still here.”
“Where else would I be?”
He rises. Sits beside me on the bed. His hand comes to the side of my face—slow, deliberate, his thumb tracing my cheekbone. I lean into his palm. Close my eyes. The warmth of his hand is the only thing in the world that makes sense right now.
He kisses me. Soft. Not the possessive, claiming thing from the parking lot.
Not the dark, controlled thing from the woods.
Something new—gentle, almost careful, the kiss of a person who understands that tonight is not about heat or hunger.
It’s about presence. It’s about being in a room with someone and saying “I’m here” with your mouth instead of your words.
I kiss him back. My hand on his chest. Feeling his heartbeat through the fabric of his shirt—steady, strong, the particular rhythm of a boy who ran a lacrosse field for two hours and carried me through the aftermath and is now sitting on a guest bed kissing me like I’m something worth being careful with.
When we pull apart, I press my forehead against his.
“I don’t want to have sex tonight,” I say. Direct. Honest. Because the old me would have given my body to avoid the conversation, would have used physical intimacy as a painkiller, and I’m trying to learn a different way. “I just want to lie here with you and not think for a while.”
“Okay.” No hesitation. No disappointment. Not even a flicker. Just: okay.
I pull off my shoes. He pulls off his. We lie down—me on my back, him on his side, his arm across my stomach, his face in my hair. The same position. The one our bodies have memorized.
The house settles around us. Downstairs, I can hear Iz and Danny talking in low voices—the murmur of two boys having a conversation they’ll never repeat.
Outside, the pool filter hums. Somewhere down the hall, Penny is asleep in a guest room Xander carried her to, wrapped in a blanket he covered her with, and neither of them will talk about it tomorrow but both of them will remember it.
Kaiden’s breathing is slow. Steady. His arm heavy and warm across my body. His thumb makes that absent circle on my hip—the unconscious gesture, the thing he does without thinking that says more than any word he’s ever spoken.
“Kaid.”
“Yeah.”
“Iz said I’m one of you now.”
“You’ve been one of us since the day you walked through that archway and I couldn’t stop looking at you.”
“That was the day you decided to make my life hell.”
“Yeah. Same day. Turns out bullying and obsession look a lot alike when you’re a fucked-up teenager who doesn’t know how to process attraction.”
“That’s the worst love confession I’ve ever heard.”
“It wasn’t a love confession.” A beat. His thumb stops circling.
“Wasn’t it?”
The question sits in the dark room like a held breath.
Neither of us answers it. Neither of us needs to.
The word is there—in the space between us, in the weight of his arm, in the way he cleaned my knuckles on the floor of a guest room and folded my sweatshirt like it was sacred and said “okay” without a second’s hesitation when I told him I didn’t want sex.
We’re not saying it. Not tonight. Maybe not for a while.
But it’s in the room. Taking up space. Growing.
“Go to sleep, Cat.”
“You first.”
“I don’t sleep when you’re in my arms. I already told you that.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to be awake for it. In case it’s the last time.”
My throat closes. My eyes sting. The ice princess catches it—barely, at the last second, the way a goalkeeper catches a shot that should have gone in—and I swallow it down and press my face into his chest and breathe until the burning stops.
“It’s not the last time,” I whisper.
“You don’t know that.”
“Yeah I do. Because you’re stuck with me now. Ryan put me in the spreadsheet. There’s no opt-out clause.”
He laughs. Quiet. The laugh that vibrates through his chest and into mine. He pulls me closer. His face in my hair. His arm tightening.
“No opt-out clause,” he repeats.
“Non-negotiable.”
The room goes quiet. The pool hums. The house breathes. Somewhere downstairs, Iz says something and Danny makes a sound that might be a laugh, and the sound of it—boys in a living room in the middle of the night, alive and together and okay—is the most comforting thing I’ve heard all day.
I close my eyes. Kaiden’s heartbeat under my ear. His arm around me. His breath in my hair.
Today I fought with my parents. Told my best friend everything.
Watched the boy I’m falling for score four goals and then hold my face like I was the trophy.
Found out my mother is being blackmailed.
Beat a boy bloody with my bare hands. Was told by five boys in a trashed living room that I belong to them now, non-negotiable, no opt-out clause.
And I’m lying in a guest bed in Xander Anderson’s house with Kaiden Monaghan’s arm around me and a word neither of us said sitting in the dark between us, and I’m not afraid.
Not of the word. Not of the morning. Not of whatever comes next.
I’m not afraid.
And that—for a girl who has been afraid since she was twelve—is everything.