Hurt me like you need me novel Chapter 18

Cade’s POV

His hand slipped off my wrist an hour ago.

I haven’t moved.

The room smells like bourbon and sleep and the particular staleness of a bed that someone’s been sweating in for hours. The ceiling fan clicks on every rotation.

Sawyer is on his back with one arm across his chest and the other hanging off the mattress, fingers curled loosely against the carpet like he’s still gripping something that isn’t there.

His face is different when he sleeps. The jaw unclenches. The lines between his brows smooth out. The permanent hostility dissolves, and the person underneath it looks like the kid who trusted people once and stopped.

I sit on the edge of his bed and watch him breathe and I don’t know what I’m doing here.

I came through that door to put my fist through his face. I had the plan — clean, simple, Cade Ellory at his most efficient.

Beat him for joining my team. Beat him for making Tyler smile. Beat him for swimming in my pool with that raw, violent stroke that Harding watched without blinking.

I had every reason and no hesitation and then he looked at me with bourbon on his breath and nothing in his eyes, and the plan dissolved like it was never solid to begin with.

His phone is on the nightstand. The screen is still glowing. He never locked it.

I pick it up.

The thread is open. Kaylee’s name at the top — my name, the one I built letter by letter in a Tinder profile weeks ago. I look at the most recent messages and the air leaves my lungs in a way I didn’t authorize.

I’m not patient.

I’m drunk.

I keep thinking about your mouth.

I stare at those last five words and something cracks behind my ribs. A hairline fracture in a structure I built when my mother died and I decided that the safest way to live inside a body that doesn’t feel things correctly is to never let a feeling arrive without a strategy attached to it.

There is no strategy attached to this.

Reading it should feel like a victory — another data point, another lever, another piece of evidence that the attic worked exactly as designed.

It doesn’t feel like that. It feels like someone handed me something fragile and breakable and I’m holding it in hands that have never been careful with anything.

I put the phone down. Look at his face in the dark.

My mother would have known what to do with this. She always knew what to do with the broken things I brought her — the dead bird I found behind the garage when I was seven, the kid at school who stopped talking to me after I said something I didn’t understand was cruel.

I’d stand in the kitchen doorway holding whatever it was and she’d crouch down and look at it and then look at me and she’d say the same thing every time.

‘What do you want to happen, Cade?’

She asked what I wanted because she was the only person who ever figured out that I don’t arrive at the right answer through morality. I arrive at it through want.

She reverse-engineered my conscience through desire and it actually worked, right up until she was in the hospital bed with tubes in her arms.

I stood in the doorway and said ‘I want you to not die.’

She smiled and said ‘Me too, baby. But what do you want to happen after?’

I didn’t have an answer. She died two days later and I still don’t have an answer and the question has been sitting in the back of my skull for nine years like a tenant who won’t leave.

What do you want to happen now, Cade?

I look at Sawyer’s face. His jaw is slack. His breathing is slow and heavy and bourbon-sour.

I want to take care of this person.

I just want to sit here and make sure he doesn’t choke in his sleep and listen to him breathe and the sheer uselessness of that want is the most uncomfortable thing I’ve felt since I held my mother’s hand and it went cold and I learned that love, when it has nowhere to go, just sits inside you and rots.

“You grabbed my wrist and said stay.”

My back hits the bathroom doorframe and the wood digs into my spine and Sawyer is standing in the middle of his room with his chest heaving and his eyes wide and his mouth red from where his teeth caught my lip or mine caught his.

“That didn’t happen.” He sounds final.

“Sawyer—”

“Get out.” He grabs the front of my shirt with both fists and walks me backward.

I let him. My feet move because some part of my brain that still functions is telling me to let him do this, let him put the distance back, let him rebuild whatever wall I just watched him tear down with his own mouth.

He shoves me through the bathroom doorway and my heel catches the tile and I stumble but I don’t fall because falling would mean reaching for him and if I reach for him right now he’ll break my jaw.

“That didn’t happen.” He says it again. Slower this time, like he’s carving it into stone.

His eyes are wild and his chest is heaving and his mouth is red and he’s standing in his doorway with his hand on the door looking at me the way you’d look at a fire you started by accident — terrified, but not of the flame.

Of the part of you that wants to stand closer to it.

The door slams. The lock clicks. The sound echoes off the bathroom tile and I’m alone.

The taste of bourbon is on my tongue and the ghost of his teeth is on my bottom lip and I press my fingers to the spot where he bit down and hold them there.

The skin is split.

That’s how I know this is real.