Chapter 16 Catherine #2
The word pulses behind my eyes. Release. The specific, chemical relief that comes from the blade meeting skin—the sharp, bright pain that cuts through the numbness like a signal fire, the only sensation strong enough to reach through the fog and say “you’re still alive.”
I press the blade to my forearm. Not cutting. Just pressing. Feeling the edge against the skin, the cold line of contact, the particular sharpness that my body recognizes the way an addict recognizes the shape of a syringe.
The bathroom doesn’t look real. The tile. The light. My reflection in the mirror—a girl in a too-big t-shirt with a razor against her arm and hollow eyes and the particular blankness of a person who has stepped outside their body and is watching from somewhere near the ceiling.
This isn’t real.
The thought arrives without urgency. Clinical. Observational. The assessment of a mind that has dissociated so completely it’s narrating its own collapse from a safe distance.
None of this is real. The kitchen. The photographs. Kaiden. The couch. The tacos. The fathers. All of it—a dream. An elaborate, detailed dream that began when I pulled the trigger in my parents’ kitchen and will end when I wake up in the fire.
Kaiden isn’t real. The boy who holds me—the hands, the voice, the heartbeat I fell asleep to—none of it. A fabrication. A story my dying brain is telling itself to make the burning bearable.
I’m still in the fire. I never got out. The beam fell and I never got out and everything since has been a hallucination and the only way to wake up is—
The blade presses harder. A thin white line appears on my skin. Not broken. Not bleeding. Just the indentation of metal against flesh, the body’s first warning that pressure is being applied.
Just do it. One cut. One real thing in all this unreality. If I bleed, I’ll know it’s real. If I bleed, I’ll know I’m alive. If I bleed—
The door opens. Kaiden stands in the doorway.
He’s in boxers and a t-shirt. His hair is damp.
He was probably going to brush his teeth.
Instead, he’s standing in his own bathroom doorway looking at the girl in his clothes with his razor pressed against her arm, and the expression on his face is the expression of a person watching something break in slow motion and knowing they might be too late to catch it.
He doesn’t scream. Doesn’t rush. Doesn’t grab.
He walks toward me. Slow. The way you approach an animal that’s been hurt—no sudden movements, no loud sounds, just steady, careful advance.
“Cat.” His voice is soft. So soft. The softest I’ve ever heard it—stripped of every edge, every dark note, every possessive register. Just a boy saying a girl’s name like it’s the most important word he’s ever spoken. “Cat. Look at me.”
I look at him. Through him. The dissociation is a window between us—I can see him but I can’t feel him. He’s on the other side of the glass.
“You’re not in the fire,” he says. Like he can hear what I’m thinking. Like he’s been where I am and knows the geography. “You’re in my bathroom. The tile is cold under your feet. The faucet is running. I’m standing in front of you and I’m real.”
“You’re not real.” My voice doesn’t sound like mine. It sounds like it’s coming from the ceiling. “None of this is real. I’m still in the fire. I never got out.”
“You got out. You got out because you’re the strongest person I’ve ever met. And you’re standing in my bathroom right now, and I need you to give me the razor.”
His hand extends. Palm up. Not reaching for it—offering. The choice is mine. He’s not going to take it from me. He’s asking me to give it.
“I just want it to stop,” I whisper. The words falling out of me like stones from a broken wall.
“The same man, Kaiden. He touched you and then he found me and he—I can’t carry this.
I can’t carry knowing that the worst thing in my life is connected to the worst thing in yours and we found each other because of him.
I want to die. I just want to die and make it stop. ”
Kaiden’s face doesn’t change. The softness holds. But I see the cost of holding it—the micro-tremor in his jaw, the brightness in his eyes that means tears are being physically prevented, the particular strain of a person absorbing an impact without flinching.
“I know,” he says. “I know you want it to stop. I’ve wanted it to stop too. I’ve stood where you’re standing—not with a razor, but with the same feeling. The feeling that the pain is bigger than the body and the only way out is through the skin.”
He takes one more step. Close now. Close enough that I can feel his warmth. Close enough that the glass wall between us gets thinner.
“But this isn’t the way out. This is the way deeper in.
And I need you here, Cat. On this side. With me.
Because I cannot do the thing we said we’d do—destroy the Penningtons, build something from the wreckage, figure out whatever we are—I can’t do any of it without you. So please. Give me the razor.”
My hand is shaking. The blade vibrates against my skin. The thin white line still there—unbroken, unbled, a border I haven’t crossed yet.
I look at his hand. Palm up. Steady. Waiting.
I set the razor in his palm. His fingers close around it.
He turns. Opens the cabinet under the sink.
Puts the razor inside. Closes the cabinet.
Doesn’t make a production of it—doesn’t throw it away dramatically or lock it up.
Just removes it from the equation and returns to me.
He takes both my hands. Holds them. My fingers are ice-cold. His are warm.
“I’m real,” he says. “Feel my hands. I’m real.”
I grip his fingers. Hard. The kind of grip that tests whether something is solid—the grip of a person who has been floating and is reaching for the ground.
The glass wall cracks. Reality seeps back in—the cold tile, the running faucet, the fluorescent light, the warmth of his hands. My body reconnects with the room one sense at a time: touch first, then sound, then sight, then the smell of his soap and the toothpaste I originally came in here for.
My legs go out. He catches me. Lowers us both to the floor—the bathroom floor, our spot now, the place where damage gets cleaned and bandages get changed and two people sit side by side and try to survive things that are too big for a bathroom.
I press my hands against my wrists. Not reaching for a blade—gripping. Squeezing the scarred skin so hard my nails leave crescents. The pressure a substitute for the cut—the body’s compromise, the nervous system accepting pain from hands instead of metal.
Kaiden sees. Takes my hands. Pries my fingers away from my wrists, one by one, gently, the way you’d pry a child’s hands off something dangerous.
“Don’t.” Soft. Not a command. “Don’t do that either.”
He holds my hands in his lap. Both of them. And we sit on the bathroom floor and I cry—the quiet kind this time, the kind that leaks rather than breaks, the kind that comes when the body is too exhausted for the dramatic version and settles for the slow one.
After a while—minutes, hours, I’ve lost the ability to measure time—he stands. Pulls me up. Walks me to the bedroom. Sits me on the bed.
He goes to the nightstand. The drawer. Pulls out a small packet—resealable, medical-grade, a row of gummy bears in careful packaging.
“These are different from the joint,” he says. “Edibles. Lower dose. Dr. Reeves knows about them. They’ll take the edge off without knocking you out.”
He holds out a red one.
“Is this going to make me high?”
“Not high. Just…quieter. The noise in your head—the spinning, the intrusive thoughts. This turns the volume down.”
I take it. Put it in my mouth. It tastes sweet. Artificial. Normal. The most normal thing I’ve consumed in a day that has been the opposite of normal.
“How long?”
“Thirty minutes, give or take. Lie down.”
We lie down. The position. Her back to my chest. My arm around her waist. The configuration our bodies have memorized.
Twenty minutes. The edge begins to soften.
Not disappearing—I can still feel it, the jagged perimeter of the day’s revelations pressing against the inside of my skull.
But the sharpness dulls. The spinning slows.
The intrusive thoughts—the razor, the fire, the photographs, Garrett’s face in two frames—lose their urgency, fading from screams to murmurs.
My body unclenches. Muscle by muscle. Jaw first, then shoulders, then the fists I didn’t realize I was making. The warmth of the edible meeting the warmth of Kaiden’s body behind me, and the combination is the closest thing to peace I’ve felt since the kitchen.
“Better?” he asks. Into my hair.
“The volume is lower.”
“Good.”
“Kaid.”
“Yeah.”
“Thank you for not being scared of me. In the bathroom. When I said—”
“I was terrified.”
“You didn’t look terrified.”
“Because you needed me not to be. So I wasn’t. But Cat—” His arm tightens. “Don’t scare me like that again. Please.”
“I’ll try.”
“That’s enough.”
The room dims. The edible deepens. My eyelids are heavy, my body sinking into the mattress, into Kaiden, into the particular gravity of a person whose heartbeat under my ear is the most reliable thing in my world.
I fall asleep. No nightmares. No fire. Just dark and warmth and the steady rhythm of a boy breathing behind me, holding on.
I am not refreshed.
I am the opposite of refreshed. I am a human being who has been wrung out like a washcloth and left to dry on a bathroom floor, and no amount of sleep—edible-assisted or otherwise—can undo what yesterday did to my nervous system.
I get ready in Kaiden’s bathroom. The razor is gone from the drawer—moved somewhere I can’t see, which is both a kindness and an indictment. I brush my teeth. Wash my face. Stare at the mirror.
The eyeliner is on the counter. The armor. The blade I paint on every morning to face the world.