Hurt me like you need me novel Chapter 10

I wake up hard.

Not morning wood. Not the lazy half-erection that fades when you roll over and check your phone. This is the full, throbbing, insistent kind that comes with a memory attached, and the memory is his mouth.

I lie perfectly still on my back with my hands at my sides and my jaw clenched and I wait for it to go down.

It doesn’t.

I stare at the ceiling. I can feel the exact second my body stopped fighting — the moment in the attic when my heels dug into the floor and every tendon pulled taut and I held my breath and lost anyway.

My body is replaying it on a loop, and every time it hits that moment, blood rushes south like it’s been given an instruction I didn’t authorize.

Five minutes. Ten. I count the cracks in the plaster and do multiplication tables in my head. Fourteen times seventeen is two hundred and thirty-eight. Nineteen times twenty-three is four hundred and thirty-seven.

His throat contracting when he swallowed…

No.

Twenty-six times thirty-one is—

I throw the covers off and pull on running shoes.

It’s 5:14 AM. The neighborhood is black except for the streetlights and a single lit window five houses down.

The air is cold enough to bite and I run. Full sprint for the first half-mile until my lungs burn and my quads scream and my body has a problem bigger than whatever is happening below my waist.

Six miles. I run the campus loop twice, past the athletic center where Cade trains, past the Delta Sig house where the Halloween decorations are still sagging off the porch.

I don’t look at it. I run until the sky turns gray and my shirt is soaked through.

I’m still half-hard when I get home.

I stand in the driveway with my hands on my knees and my breath fogging in the cold and I look down at the front of my running shorts and want to slam my fist into my own face.

Six fucking miles in thirty-degree air and my body is still chasing a mouth it shouldn’t even remember. I can’t get hard for a girl lying underneath me begging for it but a stranger pins me to a floor and forces himself on me and suddenly my dick works fine.

What the fuck does that make you, Sawyer?

Don’t answer that.

Don’t you dare answer that.

Second shower in eight hours. This one is cold from the start.

Downstairs, mom has made pancakes. She does this when she’s performing normalcy — the griddle out, batter from scratch, the sunflower apron she bought to match the new kitchen’s backsplash.

“How was the party?” She doesn’t look up from the stove. Spatula in one hand, coffee in the other. The question is casual the way a landmine is casual — step wrong and everything detonates.

“Fine.”

“Just fine?” She flips a pancake. “Did you meet anyone? Were there nice people?”

A man pinned me to the floor and put his mouth on me and I came so hard I lost vision and he swallowed and said he’d be back.

“It was a college party, Mom. People were drunk.”

“Cade didn’t come home last night.” She says it lightly, but her eyes flick to me when she thinks I’m not watching. Linda is not as oblivious as she pretends.

“I noticed.”

“Do you know where he was?”

“I don’t keep track of my stepbrother.” I pour coffee and sit at the kitchen table with my phone facedown next to my plate.

The pancakes smell like butter and vanilla and I want to throw up because my body is still humming from the run and the shower did nothing and I can feel the outline of last night pressed into my skin like a bruise that doesn’t show.

“I worry about him,” Linda says. “He doesn’t have anyone looking out for him.”

“He has Richard.”

“Richard works seventy hours a week. That boy is alone in this house more than either of you should be.” She sets a plate in front of me. Three pancakes, sliced strawberries, a drizzle of maple syrup she arranged in a spiral. “I just wish you two would—”

The front door opens.

Cade walks into the kitchen like the house is a stage and he’s hitting his mark. Yesterday’s jeans, yesterday’s black shirt wrinkled across the chest, hair pushed back but wrecked, probably by someone else’s fingers.

It’s not him.

He’s ruled out.

What comes instead is a question: if it wasn’t Cade, why does that feel like disappointment?

“Sawyer made it home by two,” Linda says, and there’s a gentle comparison to it. Your brother was responsible.

Cade charms her. I eat my pancakes and nod at the right intervals and underneath the table I open my phone.

Instagram. Search: Delta Sig Halloween. The tag pulls up forty-three posts from last night — costumes, group shots, keg stands, someone’s Joker makeup running in the rain.

I scroll with my thumb and keep my face blank and screenshot every male who fits the profile. Tall. Broad shoulders. Arms that could hold someone down.

Marco Reeves is too short. I stood next to him at the counter.

Delete.

A guy in a football jersey I don’t recognize — maybe.

Screenshot.

Davis from the swim team is wide enough but only five-ten.

Delete.

A senior named Bryce something with his arm around two girls and a neck thick enough to belong to the man in the attic.

Screenshot.

Tyler Park…

No, not Park, that’s Cade’s friend, and Tyler is lean, a swimmer’s build, not bulky enough—

But I screenshot him anyway because I’m not trusting my judgment right now.

By noon I have eleven names. I eliminate four who I’ve stood next to and know are under six feet. Seven left.

Seven men at that party who are tall enough and strong enough and one of them put his mouth on me last night and my body — my stupid, broken, traitorous body — wants it to happen again.

I close the app. Delete the screenshots from my camera roll. Watch the confirmation popup: Delete 7 photos?

No.