Hurt me like you need me novel Chapter 12

Sawyer’s POV

Her name is Hannah. She’s a junior. Brown hair, nice smile, normal.

She found me on Tinder four days after the party and I swiped right so fast my thumb cramped because she is exactly what I need — a girl, a real one, with a verified profile and photos that match and a text style that doesn’t feel like breadcrumbs leading to a dark room.

We’ve been on my bed for twelve minutes. I know because my alarm clock is on the nightstand and I’ve been watching the red numbers change while she kisses me.

She’s a good kisser. I can tell objectively the way you can tell a painting is well-made without feeling anything when you look at it.

Her mouth is warm. She tastes like the mint gum she was chewing when she walked through my front door. Her perfume is sweet, floral, the scent that’s supposed to make a guy lean closer.

I lean closer because it’s what the script says to do.

Her hand is on my chest and her fingers are playing with the collar of my shirt and she’s making small sounds against my lips that are supposed to do something to me.

They don’t.

Nothing is happening below my belt. I am kissing a pretty girl on my bed in an empty house and my body is doing absolutely nothing, the same way it did nothing with Megan, the same way it’s done nothing with every girl I’ve ever touched.

Hannah shifts closer. Her hand slides from my chest to my stomach, then lower, fingers tracing along my belt. “Is this okay?”

“Yeah.” My voice sounds like someone reading a script in a language he barely speaks.

Her fingers are small and soft on the buckle and the metal clicks open and I stare at the ceiling above her head and count the seconds and wait for my body to do the thing it’s supposed to do and it doesn’t and it won’t and I can feel her hesitate when she realizes—

Through the wall, Cade’s music starts.

Bass first. Heavy, low, the kind that vibrates through drywall and into the frame of my bed. The headboard hums against the wall. My pillow picks up the frequency. Then the melody — dark, electronic, pulsing. The same playlist he always runs.

The same sound I’ve fallen asleep to every night since we moved into this house, pressed against the thin wall that separates his life from mine.

My cock hardens so fast it hurts.

Hannah’s fingers find the change and she makes a pleased sound against my neck.

Her breath is damp on my skin and her lips are moving along my jaw and none of it registers because all I can feel is the bass in the mattress springs, pulsing up through my spine like a second nervous system switching on.

She thinks she did this — thinks her hand found the right pressure, the right angle, thinks she cracked whatever code she’d been working on.

She pulls back and smiles at me, flushed and confident. “There we go.”

It’s not you. It was NEVER going to be you.

She slides off the bed and kneels between my legs and I close my eyes before her mouth reaches me because I already know what’s about to happen.

The comparison will start.

It started the second the bass hit the wall and woke up whatever circuit the stranger activated in the attic, and now my brain is going to run two experiences side by side whether I want it to or not.

She’s tentative and careful. Asking permission with every movement, adjusting when I shift, reading my body like a considerate person, checking, pausing, making sure.

The stranger didn’t check. He pinned my arms and set his own pace and took what he wanted without pausing to ask if I was okay, and my body responded to that so hard I lost vision.

His grip was wider than hers. And his palm covered more of my thigh.

She gets back up. Her mouth closes over me again, slower this time, on her terms, and I let her set the pace. The pace is wrong — too gentle, too patient — but it doesn’t matter because I’m not here.

I’m in the attic with dust in my nose and splinters in my palms and a mouth that knew me better in five minutes than this girl will know me if she stays for a year.

The finish comes with my teeth clenched and my eyes sealed shut and both fists gripping the mattress edge so hard the frame creaks, and I don’t make a sound.

The last time I made a sound during this, I was on the floor of a dark room with a stranger’s mouth on me and whatever came out of my throat that night is something no one will ever hear again.

Hannah sits back. Wipes her mouth. Doesn’t look at me.

“That was…” She searches for a word that won’t start a conversation she doesn’t want to have. “A lot.”

I stare at the ceiling. Through the wall, Cade’s music shifts to something slower. I wonder if he heard us. I wonder if he’s listening right now. I wonder why wondering that makes my chest tighten instead of my fists.

She pulls on her jacket. Touches my arm brief and perfunctory, like she’s already decided this won’t happen twice. “I should go.”

“I’ll walk you out.”

“It’s fine.” She’s already at the door. No goodbye kiss. No look back. The front door opens and closes and her car starts and she drives away and I know she won’t text tomorrow.