Chapter 22 #2
His hands tighten on my hips. The grip that says “mine” without sound. I push back against him—deliberate, feeling him hard against my ass through the layers of fabric—and his breath catches against my neck.
“Cat. If you keep doing that, we’re not making it through this party.”
“Who says I want to make it through?”
He spins me around. Kisses me. Not soft—the hard kind, his hand in my hair, his mouth claiming mine in the middle of the dance floor with a hundred people around us and the bass vibrating through our bodies.
I grab the front of his shirt and pull him closer and the kiss deepens and someone near us whistles and neither of us acknowledges it.
We break apart. His eyes are dark. Half-lidded. The particular look that makes my stomach drop and my thighs press together.
“Later,” he says. A promise. A threat. “Later, Cat.”
The night spirals. Dancing that blurs into hours.
Iz pulling me away from Kaiden for one song—spinning me, laughing, the easy physicality of a friendship that doesn’t need to be anything more.
Danny requesting exactly one slow dance, during which he says nothing and I say nothing and we just sway, and the silence from Danny is its own form of affection.
Ryan attempting a dance move he saw on TikTok and failing so spectacularly that Ally physically leads him off the floor.
Penny. On the dance floor the entire night.
Sparkly Converse flashing under the strobes.
Teal hair wild. She dances like the music is something she’s channeling rather than hearing—full body, no restraint, the kind of dancing that makes people stop and watch.
She pulls me in. We dance together—faces close, laughing, our bodies moving in sync the way girls dance with their best friends, the way that is about joy and not performance.
Xander watches from the edge of the room. He’s been watching all night—not lurking, just present, the way he always is around Penny. He has a drink he hasn’t touched. His jaw is set. His eyes track her through the crowd with the particular intensity of a boy who is fighting something and losing.
At one point Penny grabs his hand and tries to pull him onto the floor.
He resists. She pulls harder. He comes—reluctantly, his body stiff, his face arranged into the expression of a man enduring something against his will.
But then the music shifts and Penny’s hips start moving and his hands land on her waist—automatic, unconscious, like his body has a protocol for this that his brain didn’t authorize—and for thirty seconds they dance together and neither of them breathes and then the song changes and they separate like they’ve been burned.
“Progress,” I tell her later, at the taco bar.
“Terror,” she says. “But yeah. Progress.”
Kaiden finds me between songs. His tie is loosened.
His hair is messed up—from my hands, from the heat of the room, from the particular dissolution that happens when a boy who is usually composed lets go for a few hours.
He presses me against the wall in the hallway between the kitchen and the living room and kisses me—slow this time, deep, his thumb on my jaw tilting my head back, his body pressed against mine.
“Thank you,” I say against his mouth. “For this. For tonight.”
“You deserved a normal night. A dress and a dance and a boy who’s crazy about you.”
“Is that what you are? A boy who’s crazy about me?”
“Cat. I am so far past crazy about you that the word doesn’t apply anymore. I need a new word. A bigger word. A word that means I would rebuild this entire night from scratch every week for the rest of my life if it meant seeing you look like this.”
He presses his forehead to mine. I close my eyes. “I love you,” he says. “Not in a hospital. Not in a parking lot. Here. In fairy lights. While you’re smiling.”
“I love you, Kaiden Monaghan.”
The party continues around us. The music. The lights. The mass of bodies and laughter and the particular alchemy of a night when everything terrible has been temporarily set aside and what’s left is just this: two people in a hallway, forehead to forehead, saying the truest thing they know.
Around one a.m., the crowd starts to thin.
Iz is asleep on a couch. Ryan is back on his phone.
Danny left thirty minutes ago. Ally slipped out—the way Ally does everything.
Penny is curled in an oversized armchair, half asleep, her sparkly Converse kicked off beside her.
Xander is sitting on the floor beside the chair.
Not on it. Beside it. Close enough that Penny’s hand could reach his shoulder if she extended it. She hasn’t. He hasn’t moved.
Nobody mentions it.
Kaiden’s mouth against my ear: “Home?”
I nod. We say our goodbyes. Iz half-wakes, mumbles something affectionate and incoherent. Xander doesn’t look up from his position on the floor, but he lifts two fingers—a wave, a salute, a gesture that means “go, I’m good, don’t ask me about this.”
We walk. Down Xander’s driveway. Along the street.
The October air bites through the velvet.
Kaiden takes off his suit jacket and puts it over my shoulders without asking and the gesture—the particular, automatic chivalry of a boy who is dark and rough and possessive but takes his jacket off for a girl in the cold—undoes something in me.
The Monaghan house. The front door. The lights are off downstairs—Thomas and Callum either asleep or performing sleep, giving us the grace of unmonitored entry. We slip inside. Up the stairs. Down the hall.
Our room.
He closes the door behind us. I hear the soft click of the lock—not paranoia, privacy. The sound of two people who have earned the right to be alone together.
The room is dark except for the moonlight through the curtains.
Our room. The bed where we’ve slept together every night since the hospital—holding, breathing, his arm around me like a perimeter.
But only holding. Only breathing. Because my body has been a crime scene and his hands have been careful and neither of us has pushed because pushing felt dangerous in a way that had nothing to do with the ribs.
Tonight is different. I can feel it in the air—the charge, the heat that’s been building since I walked down the stairs in green velvet and he looked at me like I was the only thing in the room worth seeing.
The charge from the dance floor. From his mouth on my neck while I ground against him in front of a hundred people.
From the whispered “later” that’s been sitting between us for three hours like a lit fuse.
Later is now.
He stands by the closed door. I stand by the bed. Four feet of moonlit air between us. The room is quiet—the house is quiet—and the silence has the particular density of a space where something is about to happen.
He doesn’t move first. I realize he’s waiting.
Waiting for me—for a signal, a word, something that tells him I’m choosing this and not just following momentum.
Because after what happened in the basement—after hands that weren’t his touched me without permission—he needs to know that these hands have permission.
That I’m here by choice. That the desperation he can see on my face is want and not obligation.
I reach behind my back. Find the zipper of the dress. Pull it down.
The velvet loosens. Slides off one shoulder. Then the other. Falls in a whisper of fabric to my hips, to my thighs, to the floor. I step out of it—careful, the heels still on—and I’m standing in the moonlight in a black bra, black underwear, the bandages, Saoirse’s necklace, and the heels.
Kaiden makes a sound. Not a word. A sound—low, guttural, involuntary. The sound of a boy whose self-control has been tested for weeks and is watching the last thread of it snap.
He crosses the four feet in two steps. His hands are on my face—both hands, holding, tilting my head up—and he kisses me and the kiss is not soft.
It’s not the tender version. It’s the kiss that’s been trapped inside the careful ones—weeks of sleeping beside me without touching, weeks of holding me while I cried and not pushing, weeks of wanting and waiting and the particular torture of proximity without contact.
All of it pouring through his mouth into mine.
I grab his shirt. Pull. Buttons pop—one, two, I don’t care about the buttons, I need the shirt off, I need his skin under my hands.
He shrugs it off. The tie is already loose and I pull it over his head and throw it somewhere and my palms are flat on his chest, his heart hammering against my hands, the tattoos warm under my fingers.
His hands go to my waist. Grip. The possessive grip—hard, pulling me flush against him so every line of his body is pressed against every line of mine.
I can feel him through his slacks—hard, pressing against my stomach—and the knowledge that he’s been like this, that he’s been carrying this want for weeks without acting on it, makes something inside me go molten.
“Kaid.” Against his mouth. Desperate. The word sounds like a plea. “I need—I need you to—”
“Tell me.” His voice is rough. Wrecked. His forehead against mine. His hands shaking on my waist. “Tell me what you need, Cat. Say the words.”
“I need you to stop being careful with me.”
Something shifts behind his eyes. The careful dissolves. What replaces it is the dark version of Kaiden—the one I saw in the car in the woods, the one who calls me his and puts his hand on my throat and says things that should scare me. The one who scares everyone except me.
He spins me around. My back against his chest. His mouth on my ear.