Hate Me Like You Love Me (Serena and Caleb) novel Chapter 38

Serena’s POV

The door slams behind Caleb, and I stand frozen on the stairs, his words ringing in my ears like an echo in an empty cathedral.

None of your business anymore, right?

The cruelty in his voice makes my chest tighten, but beneath the anger, I heard something else. Something broken and desperate. The sound of someone drowning and refusing to reach for the life preserver.

I should let him go. Should climb these stairs back to my room, bury myself in textbooks and pretend I don’t care where he disappears to in the middle of the night.

Should honor the boundaries I drew between us, the clean lines I insisted were necessary for both our survival.

I last exactly ten minutes.

Ten minutes of pacing my room, of staring at calculus problems that blur together into meaningless symbols, of telling myself that whatever Caleb does with his life isn’t my responsibility anymore.

Ten minutes of pretending the fear clawing at my chest means nothing.

Then something pulls me toward his room—call it curiosity, call it the worry I refuse to name, call it the magnetic force that’s drawn me to him since we were children and I was too young to understand why.

I slip through the bathroom door that connects our spaces, feeling like a trespasser in territory that used to welcome my touch.

The familiar scent of cedar and amber hits me immediately, mixing with something sharper—stress sweat, energy drinks, the metallic tang of desperation.

His room looks like someone’s been living in survival mode.

Clothes scattered across the floor, bed unmade with sheets twisted like he’s been fighting battles in his sleep, empty energy drink cans crowding his desk beside textbooks that look unopened.

Evidence of someone unraveling at the edges, barely holding themselves together.

A duffel bag catches my eye, shoved halfway under his bed with the zipper partially open. I’ve never seen it before, and something about the way it’s hidden makes my stomach clench with premonition.

I crouch down, my heart hammering against my ribs. This is wrong. This is a violation of his privacy, his space, his trust.

But my hands move anyway, pulling the bag toward me despite every rational thought screaming at me to stop.

Inside: a helmet, black with silver racing stripes. Racing gloves, worn leather that’s been gripped too many times by desperate hands.

A leather jacket scuffed and scraped with use, evidence of contact with asphalt at speeds that make my throat close up.

And beneath it all, folded like it’s been read and reread a hundred times, a piece of paper covered in handwritten notes. Locations, dates, times. A race schedule spanning weeks, maybe months.

One date circled in black ink, the marker so heavy it’s torn through the paper: tonight.

The pieces slam together with the force of a collision I should have seen coming. The crash I witnessed that night when Lucas took me to the circuit.

The way Caleb moved through that crowd like he belonged there. Shane’s name on the registry instead of Caleb’s. The bruises I’d noticed and dismissed, the exhaustion that went beyond normal teenage stress.

He’s still racing. Still climbing onto that bike, still risking his life like it means nothing, like he’s dispensable.

“Why?” I whisper to the empty room, my voice cracking on the single word. “What could possibly be worth this?”

But even as I ask, part of me already knows. The same part that’s watched him carry burdens too heavy for someone our age, that’s seen the way he steps between danger and everyone he cares about without hesitation.

You don’t have to justify love, a voice in my head whispers, but I push it away because love isn’t what this is. Love is what gets people hurt, what destroys families, what creates messes too complicated to clean up.

This is just… concern. The same concern I’d have for any friend making dangerous choices.

But friends don’t memorize each other’s racing schedules.

Friends don’t break into each other’s rooms at midnight. Friends don’t drive across town in the middle of the night because they can’t bear the thought of someone they care about getting hurt.

When I finally reach the coordinates from the schedule, my GPS leads me to what looks like an abandoned airstrip on the outskirts of the city.

Floodlights cut harsh white slashes through the December darkness, and the roar of engines carries across the empty fields like thunder that won’t stop.

I park behind a row of trucks and motorcycles, my hands shaking as I turn off the ignition.

Through my windshield, I can see crowds of people gathered around a makeshift track, money changing hands, the kind of energy that comes from violence and speed and the possibility of watching someone die.

I don’t know why I came. Don’t know what I’ll say when I find him, don’t know how to bridge the gap I created between us, don’t know how to be the person who cares this much while pretending I don’t.

I only know I couldn’t stay away.

And somewhere in the chaos of engines and shouting and floodlights, Caleb is risking everything for reasons I don’t understand.