Hurt me like you need me novel Chapter 14

“Isn’t this exciting?” Mom leans into me. Her perfume fights the chlorine from the bleachers. Today she looks like she is going somewhere nicer than a college swim meet. “Richard says this is a qualifying meet. If they win, they go to regionals.”

“Great.”

“You could try to look like you want to be here.”

“I don’t want to be here.”

The chlorine is burning my eyes. Some kid behind me keeps kicking my seat. I haven’t slept more than three hours a night since the text about my running route.

Every time I close my eyes I feel hands that aren’t there and I am losing my fucking mind and she wants me to look excited about a swim meet.

“I know.” She pats my knee. “But your stepbrother is about to swim and your stepfather is watching and it would mean a lot to both of them if you looked up from your phone for five minutes.”

I put my phone away because it is easier than arguing and I don’t have anywhere else to look anyway. Cade is stepping onto the blocks in lane four.

He shakes his arms out. Rolls his neck. Adjusts his goggles with two fingers and settles into the starting position — bent forward, hands gripping the edge, shoulders bunched.

His hands are large even from thirty rows up. His fingers wrap the edge of the block and I want to break every one of them.

That’s the thing about Cade.

He’s the most hateable person I’ve ever met and he looks like that. He stands on a starting block half-naked and his body doesn’t have a single flaw I can use against him.

Just clean lines and dense muscle and a jaw that could’ve been cut with a straight razor and I want to drag him off that block and slam his perfect fucking face into the tile until he looks like the rest of us.

The starting buzzer sounds and he dives and the thought sinks with him.

I’ve never watched him from the stands. I’ve seen him leave for practice, come back smelling like chlorine, eat four thousand calories in one sitting.

But I’ve never seen it from this angle, where the overhead lights hit the water and his body cuts through it like it was designed for this and nothing else.

His shoulders break the surface on the first stroke. Spine rolling. Arms pulling in clean arcs that don’t splash, every movement stripped of waste.

The pool is fifty meters and he crosses it in strokes I can count on two hands. He flips at the wall and the push-off sends him gliding underwater for what feels like an impossible distance before he surfaces and the arms start again.

The girl two rows down whispers “oh my god” to her friend and I hate her instantly.

“He’s so fast.” Mom grabs my arm. “Is that fast? That looks fast.”

“I don’t know, Mom.”

I know. That is fast. And that’s exactly why I wanted to drown him when he took my spot in the high school team.

“Richard, is that fast?” She turns to him, body angling toward his.

Richard leans forward with his elbows on his knees. “That’s fast.”

Coach checks the stopwatch. Checks it again.

When Cade touches the wall, the team erupts. Tyler is the first one there — he grabs Cade by the shoulders and hauls him out of the water into a bear hug, both of them dripping, Tyler’s hands on Cade’s bare skin.

Marsh comes next, slapping his back hard enough that the sound cracks across the pool deck. Cade laughs — head back, throat exposed, water running down his chest — and hooks his arm around Tyler’s neck.

My fists clench in my lap.

I watch Tyler’s hands on Cade’s shoulders and I want to walk down there and shove Tyler into the pool and hold his head under until the bubbles stop.

I want to peel his grip off Cade’s skin one knuckle at a time and ask him who the fuck told him he was allowed to touch my —

To touch Cade. Not my anything.

Cade is not my anything.

What the fuck is wrong with me?

Mom nudges my elbow. “Go congratulate your brother.”

“Sawyer.” She gives the look that says I brought you into this world and I will absolutely make the car ride home a living hell. “Go. Now.”

Maybe.

My vision narrows to a point. Marsh is playing wingman and Tyler is grinning and Cade said maybe like he might actually walk over to some stranger and let him…

Let him what? Talk? Flirt? Touch?

This is not jealousy. Jealousy requires wanting someone and I don’t want—

My eyes betray me before my brain can intervene. They drop from his face to his chest. To the flat plane of his stomach where water pools in the dip of his navel. To his hip, the cut of the V above the waistband, the line of muscle that disappears under the fabric.

My gaze traces it in a well-lit corridor full of people and I have no excuse.

Fuck.

I drag my eyes back to his face. He tracked every inch of where my gaze just went.

Here it comes. The smirk. The loaded comment in front of five teammates who just spent two minutes talking about how fuckable he is.

He’s going to humiliate me and I walked right into it because Mom asked nicely and I’m a fucking idiot.

I set my jaw. “Mom says good swim.”

The team conversation pauses. Tyler looks between us. Marsh sips his water.

“Thanks, Sawyer.” Cade says it quietly with no performance for the audience, then turns back to Tyler.

He holds my eyes for a beat — just long enough that it feels deliberate — and then he turns back to Tyler and picks up whatever conversation I interrupted. His shoulder shifts and Tyler’s hand falls off it.

Was that intentional?

I stand there two seconds too long before I walk back down the corridor.

He had the shot. Five teammates right there, my eyes still burning from the path they traced down his body, and he had the ammunition to destroy me.

He didn’t take it.

I sit in the back seat on the drive home and the only thing I can think about is thanks, Sawyer with no knife behind it.

Why the fuck that scares me?