Chapter 23 - Kaiden #3
The word—my word, the one I use on her, the possessive declaration that’s been the language of us since the woods—coming from her mouth. Reversed. Claimed.
I stare at the road. Recalibrate. Remember how to breathe. “You are fucking terrifying, Catherine O’Farrell.”
“I know.” She buckles her seatbelt. Pulls down the visor mirror. Checks her lip gloss. “Now take me home. We have a date tonight.”
***
Our room. Getting ready.
“Car show,” I say. “There’s a meet tonight at the fairgrounds. Then dinner. Wear whatever—it’s parking lot cars and food trucks.”
Cat is standing at the closet in her bra and underwear, contemplating options like she’s making a foreign policy decision.
The bandages are mostly off now—the chemical burns healing into the puckered pink of new scars, joining the older ones on her body like new text added to an existing document.
The rib wrap is still there. The eyeliner is on. Her hair is down.
I’m sitting on the bed in jeans and nothing else because I made the mistake of taking my shirt off before putting a new one on and then Cat walked out of the closet in her underwear and my brain stopped functioning.
She catches me staring. “Stop.”
“You’re standing in our bedroom in a black bra and you want me to stop looking at you.”
“We have to leave in twenty minutes.”
“We have to leave in twenty minutes,” I repeat. Standing. Walking toward her. My hand on her waist. Pulling her against me. “That’s at least fifteen more than I need.”
She tilts her head back. Green eyes. The particular challenge in them that means she’s not going to stop me but she’s going to make me work for it.
My mouth on her neck. Her hands on my chest. My thumb hooking under the waistband of her underwear. She arches into me—the sharp inhale, the way her fingers dig into my shoulders—
The front door opens. Downstairs. Voices. Thomas and Callum, returning from wherever lawyers go on Thursday afternoons.
We freeze. Her hand flat on my chest. My thumb still hooked in her underwear. Both of us staring at each other with the particular wide-eyed horror of two people who were three seconds from being horizontal and are now acutely aware that their parents are directly below them.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Cat whispers.
I drop my forehead to hers. Exhale. “Later.”
“You keep saying later.”
“And I keep delivering. Get dressed. Car show.”
She groans. Turns back to the closet. Pulls on black leggings, a band tee, my grey lacrosse sweatshirt because she has claimed it permanently and I’ve stopped pretending I’ll get it back. She sits on the bed to put on her Vans.
I pull on a black t-shirt. A hoodie. Sneakers. Run my hands through my hair. Good enough.
She looks at me. I look at her. Both of us in casual clothes in a bedroom we share in a house where our families live together, getting ready for a date like normal teenagers.
Normal. Still learning.
The car show is in a fairground parking lot twenty minutes outside Edgewood.
Not the polished, roped-off kind where you pay admission to look at cars behind stanchions—the real kind.
The kind where guys park their builds in a gravel lot and pop their hoods and stand around in the October cold arguing about turbo sizing and compression ratios while their girlfriends sit on tailgates and pretend to be interested.
Except Cat is not pretending.
The Skyline turns heads the moment we pull in. Every import guy in the lot clocks it—the R33, the RB26, the distinctive sound of the Holset spooling as I park between a clean Supra and a beat-to-shit S13. People start drifting toward us before I’ve even killed the engine.
Cat is out of the car before me. She pops the hood without asking—she knows the latch, knows the prop rod, knows the position. By the time I come around to her side, she’s already in conversation with a guy in a Nissan hat about my intercooler piping.
“Is that custom?” he asks. Talking to me. Looking at my engine bay.
“All custom,” Cat says. Before I can answer. “Holset HX40 on a stock-block RB26. Custom piping, aftermarket wastegate, front-mount intercooler. Five-forty at the wheels on pump. He fabricated the manifold himself.”
The guy stares at Cat. Then at me. Then at Cat. The expression of a man recalibrating his assumptions about who at this car show knows what they’re talking about.
“Your girlfriend knows cars.”
“My girlfriend knows everything.”
We walk the lot. Cat studies every build with the particular attention of someone who understands what she’s looking at—asks questions about the LS swap in a 240Z, debates the merits of ITBs versus a single throttle body with a guy twice her age who is visibly delighted to be having this conversation, spends ten minutes examining a restored Datsun 510 with the focused intensity she usually reserves for calculus proofs.
I watch her. Not the cars—her. The way she lights up in this environment, the way her body language opens and the ice princess steps aside and what’s left is just a girl who reads service manuals for fun and rebuilds carburetors and knows the difference between an HX40 and a T04Z and is, in this parking lot full of gearheads and grease, entirely and completely in her element.
She catches me watching. “What?”
“Nothing. You’re just…you.”
“That’s not a compliment.”
“It’s the biggest compliment I know how to give.”
Dinner is a food truck on the edge of the lot.
A burger truck, the kind that uses smash patties and American cheese and the kind of bun that falls apart in your hands.
We sit on the tailgate of someone’s F150 that they’ve generously abandoned, our legs dangling, the lot emptying as the evening cools.
This is the part I’ve been waiting for. Not the cars, not the food.
The talking. The particular kind of talking that happens when two people who have been surviving things together finally have a moment where they’re not surviving anything—they’re just sitting on a tailgate eating burgers and the only agenda is each other.
"MIT," I say. "You hear back on housing yet?"
"Early January. But I'm hoping for East Campus. The culture is…weird. In a way I think I'd like."
"Weird how?"
"They build roller coasters in their hallways. They paint murals on every surface. One of the dorms has a ball pit." She takes a bite of her burger. "It's chaos, but it's intentional chaos. Organized by people who are too smart for rules."
"Sounds like you."
"Sounds like us." She looks at me. "Have you heard anything yet? From your schools?"
"Spring. All the decisions come in the spring. Georgetown, Columbia, American—I won't know until March or April."
"That's months away."
"Yeah. So right now it's just applications and waiting and trying not to refresh my email every thirty seconds."
She's quiet for a moment. The food trucks are closing up. The lot lights cast everything in a flat orange glow.
"What do you want?" she asks. "Not the plan. Not the schools and the degrees. What do you actually want? Like, if you close your eyes and picture yourself at thirty—what does it look like?"
I think about it. Really think. Not the answer I give adults—the polished, politician's-son answer about public service and policy. The real answer.
"A kitchen," I say. "Not my parents' kitchen.
Mine. With enough counter space to actually cook on and a window that faces something green.
A job that uses my brain in a way that matters—policy, economics, something where the numbers actually change people's lives.
And you to come home to who doesn't need me to perform.
Who knows the worst parts and stays anyway. "
I look at her. "What about you?"
She processes. Cat doesn't give quick answers to important questions.
"A lab," she says eventually. "With equipment I built myself.
Solving problems that most people don't know exist—energy problems, infrastructure problems, the kind of math that keeps the lights on.
And outside the lab…" She pauses. "A house where I'm not afraid to sleep.
With your heartbeat I recognize in the dark.
Friends who know everything about me and don't flinch. "
"We might be in different cities."
"Probably will be. At least for a while."
"Does that scare you?"
"No. Basements scare me. Distance is just logistics."
I laugh. She smiles. The real one. "We'll figure it out," she says. "We figured out how to survive the same abuser. Different zip codes shouldn't be that hard."
"Weekends."
"Every weekend."
"Summer."
"Every summer."
"And if one of us can't handle the distance?"
"Then we drive. Or fly. Or build a teleporter. I'm going to MIT, Kaid. If anyone can figure out teleportation, it's me."
I take her hand. Kiss her knuckles—the gesture from the hospital, the punctuation of every important moment between us. "You're the best thing that's ever happened to me, Catherine O'Farrell."
"Don't get sappy on a tailgate, Monaghan. It's undignified."
"Too late."
She leans her head on my shoulder. My arm around her. The lot nearly empty. October sky clear and full of stars.
We sit. Not talking. Not needing to. Two people on a tailgate, holding hands, planning a future that includes roller-coaster dorms and economic policy and a house with a green view and a heartbeat in the dark.
Normal. Finally.
We drive home. The road is dark and empty and the Skyline fills the silence. Cat’s hand on mine on the console. Her head against the window. Content. The particular stillness of a person who has had a good night and is letting it settle.
We pull into the driveway. The house is lit—the kitchen, my father’s office, the warm glow of a house that’s still awake and occupied. Thomas’s car beside my father’s.
Inside. Cat kisses me at the bottom of the stairs—soft, brief, the kind that says “tonight was perfect and I’m going to shower and then I’m going to be in our bed and you’re going to be beside me.”
“Give me twenty minutes,” she says. “Shower.”
“Take your time.”
She goes upstairs. I hear the bathroom door. The water. I stand in the hallway. My father’s office door is open. Through it, I can see Callum at his desk. Down the hall, in the living room, Thomas is reading.
My heart is doing something fast and irregular that has nothing to do with the drive and everything to do with what I’m about to do. I walk to the living room first. Thomas looks up.
“Mr. O’Farrell. Can you come to the living room for a minute? I need to talk to both of you.”
Thomas frowns. Sets down his book. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah. I just—I need to talk to you and my dad. Together.”
I go to the office. “Pop. Living room. I need a minute.”
Callum looks up. Reads my face. The particular assessment of a father who has been reading his son’s expressions for eighteen years and can identify the difference between panic and purpose. “Should I be worried?”
“No. Just…come sit.”
The living room. Both fathers on the couch. Me in the armchair across from them. The particular configuration of a young man asking something from the men whose opinions matter most.
Thomas looks at Callum. Callum looks at Thomas. They both look at me.
“Relax,” I say. Because they both look like I’m about to tell them something catastrophic. “Nobody’s pregnant. Nobody’s dying. I just—”
I take a breath. Press my hands together. Look at both of them—the father I was born to and the father I earned—and say the words I’ve been building toward since I held Cat’s hand in a hospital room and told her I loved her while she was too sedated to hear.
“I have a plan. And I need both of your permission before I do it.”
Thomas leans forward. “Permission for what, exactly?”
I look at him. At my father. At the hallway that leads to the stairs that lead to the room where the girl I love is standing in the shower with no idea that her boyfriend is downstairs asking two fathers for something that isn’t a proposal but might be the thing that comes before one.