Hurt me like you need me novel Chapter 20

Sawyer’s POV

“So, Sawyer.” George Ellory sets down his wine glass and turns the full weight of his attention on me like a searchlight finding a cockroach. “Richard tells me you’ve joined the swim team.”

Cade’s grandfather is tall even sitting down. White hair combed back, jaw like a shelf, hands that look like they’ve never done manual labor but could if they had to. He wears a blazer to dinner in his own house.

The man probably sleeps in a fucking blazer.

I swallow a mouthful of roast beef. “Yes, sir.”

“Relay alternate, is that right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.” He cuts his meat unbothered. “Cade, you’re still anchor?”

“Yes, sir.” Cade’s voice from across the table. I haven’t looked at him since we sat down. Nine days of not looking at him and I’ve gotten good enough at it to qualify for the Olympics.

“Strong team this year?”

“Strongest in the conference,” Cade says, and there’s that voice — the warm, polished one that makes everyone in the room think he’s the best kid they’ve ever met. “Coach Harding thinks we’ve got a real shot at regionals.”

“Harding.” George nods like the name tastes respectable. “Navy man, wasn’t he?”

“Twelve years.”

“Good. Structure builds character.” He turns back to me. “And what were your events, son?”

There it is. Son. Delivered like a rank I didn’t apply for. George Ellory has known me for approximately nine hours total across two encounters and he’s already filed me under a category that comes with expectations I haven’t agreed to meet.

“Hundred free. Two hundred IM.”

“Same as Cade.”

“Not quite.” Cade again, and I can hear the edge underneath the polish. “Sawyer’s a sprinter. I’m a distance swimmer who happens to sprint.”

His mouth shapes the words and I watch it happen in my peripheral vision and my brain immediately supplies the image — that same mouth, two in the morning, bourbon-wet, the split second before it hit mine.

The pressure. The heat. The way his bottom lip caught between my teeth and the sound he made, small and involuntary, the only uncontrolled sound I’ve ever heard Cade Ellory make.

I dig my fork into the roast beef hard enough to scrape porcelain.

“There’s a difference?” George asks.

“Ask Coach.”

Diane, Cade’s grandmother, sets a bowl of roasted potatoes on the table. She is seventy-one, five-foot-nothing. Silver hair cut short. Her face is all angles and she has eyes that miss absolutely fucking nothing.

She’s been moving between the kitchen and the dining room all evening, refusing Mom’s help with a gentle wave and a “Sit, Linda, you drove seven hours.”

She’s smaller than everyone else at this table but somehow she takes up the most space.

We got here this afternoon. Mom dropped the plan three days ago at breakfast — Richard’s parents’ house for the week, the whole family, Christmas together.

Seven hours in the car with my hood up and my headphones in and the middle seat between me and Cade so empty it might as well have been mined.

Seven hours of his cologne leaking past my headphones because smell doesn’t give a shit about boundaries.

Seven hours of catching his reflection in the window when the light shifted and seeing his hands in his lap and thinking about those hands on my chest in the bathroom — first a fist, then flat, then holding me up — and wanting to open the car door at seventy miles an hour and roll into a ditch because at least the road rash would give me something to think about that isn’t his fucking mouth.

The Ellory house is old money that doesn’t need to announce itself. Three stories of gray stone, bare maples lining the drive, more bedrooms than people.

Diane opened the door before Richard rang the bell. She hugged her son. Kissed Cade on both cheeks and held his shoulders and looked at his face with an expression I couldn’t read — grief, assessment.

Honestly? I get it.

The table goes quiet for exactly one second. The way tables do when someone says your mother about a dead woman at a holiday dinner.

Richard reaches for his wine. George clears his throat. Mom puts her hand on Richard’s knee under the table — I see the movement, the small gesture that says ‘I’m here.’

I watch him from across the table and for the first time in nine days I don’t look away fast enough. His eyes catch mine.

We hold for two seconds — long enough to feel, short enough to deny — and then I’m staring at my plate and my neck is hot and my fork is gripped tight enough to bend.

“Right.” George pushes back from the table. “Excellent dinner, Di. Richard, help me with the dishes.”

“Dad, you don’t have to—”

“I want to. Your mother cooked. We clean. That’s the deal since 1978.” He stands and collects plates like he has been doing this exact task at this exact table for years.

Diane unties her apron and hangs it on the hook by the kitchen door. She looks at me. Then at Cade. Then back at me.

“Boys.” Her voice is the pleasant kind of firm that doesn’t leave room for negotiation. “The tree’s at Henderson’s lot on Route 9. They close at eight.” She pulls a set of keys from the drawer by the fridge and holds them out. “Take the truck. It’s the blue one in the barn. George was supposed to pick it up yesterday but he forgot.”

“Diane—” Mom starts.

“Linda, sit. Drink your wine. The boys can handle a tree.” She’s looking at me when she says it but the instruction is for both of us. “It’s a ten-minute drive.”

Cade takes the keys from her hand. His fingers brush hers and she holds his hand for a beat like she has decided we need to be in a truck together whether we like it or not.

“Blue one in the barn,” Cade repeats.

“Don’t get a small one. George likes them tall.”