Hurt me like you need me novel Chapter 19

The house has been quiet for eleven hours.

Sawyer’s door hasn’t opened. Not to eat, not to shower, not to take a piss. Either he’s dead in there or sitting with his jaw clenched, replaying the worst four seconds of his life on a loop and building a wall so thick he’ll forget there was ever a door.

I’m on the couch with my laptop open and the TV muted and a cold cup of coffee on the table that I poured two hours ago and haven’t touched.

The mug has a ring of scum forming on the surface. I watch it and think about how everything in this house turns to shit when you stop paying attention to it for five minutes.

Linda and Richard are at the conference until Sunday. The house smells like the bourbon Sawyer spilled on the nightstand and the coffee I forgot about and the faint chemical trace of pool chlorine that lives in my skin now, permanent, like a watermark.

I can still taste him.

My bottom lip is split where his teeth caught it. I keep running my tongue across the cut and every time I do, my pulse spikes, and every time my pulse spikes, I catalog it, and I’m getting tired of cataloging.

The cut stings when I press it. I press it anyway. I press it until the copper taste blooms on my tongue because at least that’s a sensation I can fucking explain.

I went through his room while he was in the shower this morning.

His sheets were still twisted from where he’d been thrashing and there was a dent in the pillow where his head had been and the bourbon bottle was on the floor, tipped sideways, a dark stain spreading into the carpet.

I picked it up. Set it on his desk. Stood there for another forty seconds breathing in the smell of him — sweat, alcohol, the cheap shampoo he uses that smells like grocery store mint — and I thought about the way his fingers felt around my wrist, tight and desperate.

Then I heard the shower stop and I walked out and closed the door and went downstairs like a person who has his shit together, which I don’t.

Which is becoming a problem.

I type into the search bar: signs you are in love.

The results come back instantly. Psychology Today. Healthline. A listicle from Cosmopolitan that I click on because rock bottom has a basement and I’m apparently in it.

Constant preoccupation with the other person.

I scroll past it, obviously.

I’ve been preoccupied with Sawyer since he was kind enough to look at me like I’d crawled out of a medical waste bin and asked to borrow his toothbrush.

Physical reactions: elevated heart rate, sweating, loss of appetite.

I haven’t eaten since the pool. My hands were shaking four hours ago. My resting heart rate hasn’t dropped below ninety since his mouth hit mine.

Check, check, check.

Intrusive thoughts about the person’s wellbeing.

I do keep thinking about whether he’s drinking water. Whether he fell asleep on the floor. Whether the split in his lip is the mirror of mine or if I imagined the contact point.

These thoughts have no utility. They don’t advance any plan. They just arrive and sit there like stray dogs I can’t stop feeding.

Desire to protect from harm, even at personal cost.

I stop scrolling.

I read it again. Then I close the laptop and stare at the blank TV screen and see my reflection in it — a blond kid on a couch with a split lip and dark circles and an expression I don’t recognize because it doesn’t belong to any version of myself I’ve built.

I look like shit. Cade Ellory, captain of the fucking swim team, undone by a four-second kiss from a boy who won’t even open his door to piss.

The house phone rings.

“You have a collect call from an inmate at a Federal Bureau of Prisons facility. To accept the call, press one. To decline—”

I hope it is killing him.

I hope it follows him into every conversation and every voicemail and every moment he forgets to watch his tone and then catches it and thinks that was him, that was his voice coming out of my throat.

The receiver clicks into the cradle and I stand in the kitchen with my hand still on it and I replay what I just heard.

Out by January.

My grip tightens on the receiver until the plastic creaks.

The fridge is cycling on with a rattle that sounds like it’s chewing its own motor, and I can smell the dish soap from the sink and the burnt coffee and underneath all of it, faintly, bourbon, because this whole goddamn house smells like Sawyer now and I can’t get away from it and I don’t want to get away from it and that’s the whole fucking problem.

Dale Drum, who broke his wife’s wrist when Sawyer was nine. Dale Drum, who called his son a faggot before Sawyer even knew what the word meant.

That man wants to talk to Sawyer.

That man could be free in a month.

I picture it. Dale Drum walking out of Lompoc with a bag of personal effects and a bus ticket. Dale Drum standing on our porch ringing the doorbell.

Dale Drum sitting across from Sawyer at a kitchen table, close enough to touch him, close enough to see the flinch that Sawyer swears he doesn’t have, close enough to say the words that put the flinch there in the first place.

I picture Sawyer’s face when he hears that voice. The way his shoulders would pull up around his ears. The way his jaw would lock and his eyes would go flat and every wall he’s spent years building would slam shut so fast you’d hear the air displacement.

Something in my chest goes dark and quiet and very, very focused.

I don’t know when Sawyer became mine. I don’t know if it was the attic or the diner or the wrist or the kiss or the split lip I keep touching with my tongue.

But he is. And the man on that phone is not going to get within a hundred feet of him.