Hurt me like you need me novel Chapter 13

Seven days. Forty re-reads. Zero replies.

The text sits in my phone like a splinter I can’t reach. I open it at 2 AM when I can’t sleep. I open it in the bathroom between classes.

I open it in the kitchen while Mom talks about her book club and Cade eats cereal three feet away and I stare at five words on a screen and my mouth goes dry every single time.

‘You tasted better than I expected.’

I haven’t replied. I won’t reply. Replying means acknowledging that whatever happened in that attic is a conversation, and it’s an assault. It’s a crime.

It’s a thing that was done to me by a man I can’t identify, and responding to his text would make it something with a back-and-forth, something where both sides have a voice, something closer to what happens between two people who choose each other.

I didn’t choose this.

My body chose it and my body is a traitor and I don’t negotiate with traitors.

It’s Tuesday morning. 5:52 AM. I’m three miles into the campus loop, the air cold enough that my lungs ache on every inhale and my breath comes out in white bursts that dissolve into the dark.

The pavement is wet from overnight rain and my shoes slap through shallow puddles that reflect the streetlights back at me like eyes opening in the ground.

I run this route every day. Same time, same path, same six miles. Past the athletic center, left on College Ave, through the parking lot behind the science building, up the hill past faculty housing, and back down along the campus loop road where the streetlights space out and the trees close in and for about a quarter mile you can’t see the road ahead or behind.

My phone buzzes in my armband.

I slow to a jog, then stop on the shoulder. Pull the phone out. The screen is bright enough to hurt and I have to blink twice before the letters sharpen.

Kaylee: Six miles every morning. You should switch up the route.

The sweat on my neck goes cold. It starts at the base of my skull and runs down my spine like someone drew a finger along it.

He knows my running route.

Which means he’s either watching me from somewhere along it or he’s run it himself, tracking my schedule, mapping my patterns, and he knows I’m standing right here right now with my phone in my shaking hand.

I spin around.

The road stretches empty in both directions — trees, streetlights, the dark bulk of the athletic center a quarter mile back.

A campus shuttle crawls past. Its headlights sweep across me and I flinch. The driver doesn’t look my way. The taillights shrink to red dots and disappear around the curve.

Nobody on the sidewalk. Nobody in the parking lot. Nobody, and that’s almost worse because it means he’s not where I can see him.

He’s watching from a window, maybe. Or from a car. Or he ran the route twenty minutes ahead of me and already knows I stop at the same shoulder every time I check my phone.

I sprint home. My shoes slap the pavement and my lungs burn and I run so fast my vision tunnels on the road ahead and I don’t slow down until I’m in the driveway with my hands on the door handle and my chest heaving.

Inside. Lock the door. Upstairs. Lock my bedroom door.

I sit on the bed and pull up the seven screenshots on my phone. The seven men from the party who fit the stranger’s build. I’ve been staring at these faces for a week and now I have a new filter: who lives near the campus loop road.

That makes three of them.

Bryce Keller lives in the apartments on College Ave — I can see the building from the hill section of my route. A guy named Webb whose last name I don’t know lives in the dorms that back onto the parking lot behind the science building.

And Davis, the freshman from the swim team, whose Instagram bio says he’s in the athletic housing block right next to the center I run past every morning.

The swim team.

I pull up the roster on my phone. My fingers are still shaking and I have to type the URL twice.

Could I be wrong about the height?

What if I’m wrong about all of it?

Do you even know what kind of guy does that?

Sawyer: Fuck you I run where I want.

You’re pathetic, Sawyer.

I open my running app. The route is mapped out in blue — six miles, same path, same loop I’ve been running since September.

Any sane person being stalked would change the route. Move the time, vary the path, avoid the quarter-mile stretch where the streetlights thin out and the trees press in.

That’s what a rational, self-preserving person would do.

I am not rational.

I close the app. I’m not changing my route because some psycho with a burner phone thinks he can dictate my schedule.

That’s the same stubborn streak that walked me into every fight since middle school, the same refusal to back down that got my nose broken at fourteen and my knuckles split at sixteen and my face rearranged by Cade Ellory behind the pool building junior year.

Sawyer Drum does not adjust his life because someone tells him to. He does not run scared. He does not give ground.

That’s the reason.

The other reason — the one sitting underneath it, curled up in the dark like a fist I won’t open — is that I want to round a dark corner at 6:14 AM tomorrow morning and feel those hands again.

I want the trees to close in and the streetlights to disappear and I want him to step out of the shadows and grab me and pin me and do it again.

I want to fight him and lose.