Hurt me like you need me novel Chapter 21

I kissed my stepbrother days ago and haven’t slept a full night since.

The Henderson’s lot appears on the right. Hand-painted sign, string lights wrapped around a chain-link fence, rows of firs and Douglas pines lined up like soldiers waiting to be picked off.

A girl in a flannel jacket sits on a stool behind a folding table covered in cash boxes and price tags. She looks up when we pull in.

Cade parks the truck and kills the engine. The silence gets worse without the rattle.

“I’ll get the tree,” I say, already opening the door. “You stay here.”

He looks at me. The dashboard glow catches the bottom half of his face and the split on his lip is right there, pink and healing, and I put that there with my teeth and we both know it and neither of us has said a word about it in days.

“It’s a fucking Christmas tree, Sawyer.” His voice is low and amused. “Relax, okay?”

“I said stay in the truck.” I hold his gaze when I say it, which is a stupid mistake.

His eyes are dark in the cab light and they drop to my mouth for half a second — half a fucking second — and then he’s looking at my eyes again and the corner of his mouth twitches.

“Sure.” He pockets the keys and opens his door.

He doesn’t stay in the truck.

I’m two rows deep in the firs, inspecting a seven-footer with a bald spot on the left side, when I hear a new laugh. It is low and genuine.

I look through the gap between two pines.

Cade is leaning against the tailgate with his arms crossed and his breath fogging around his face and he’s doing absolutely nothing and the girl from the register is already two feet closer than she was when I walked into the rows.

Flannel jacket. Dark hair pulled back. Tall — almost his height. She’s standing with her weight on one hip and her head tilted and she’s smiling at him.

He says something I can’t hear. She laughs again and touches his arm, her fingers landing on his bicep and staying there.

I grab the seven-footer and drag it out of the row.

It’s too heavy. The trunk is thick and the branches scrape the ground and I’m hauling it by the base with both hands like I’m pulling a body through a forest and I don’t care because I need to get back to that truck before she touches him again.

What is wrong with you?

Yes, you kissed him once while you were drunk, so now what?

You have no fucking right to feel this.

I drag the tree to the truck and drop it on the ground hard enough that both of them look at me.

“This one,” I say.

The girl looks at the tree, then at me, then at Cade.

Up close she’s got freckles across her nose and dark eyes and the face that would’ve done something for me six months ago, before the attic, before the pills, before the wall and the bass and the mouth I can’t stop—

“I’m Jules.” She extends her hand.

I shake. Her grip is warm and firm and I drop it too fast. “Sawyer.”

“Are you two brothers?”

“Stepbrothers,” Cade says.

Like that prefix changes a fucking thing.

Jules grins. There’s a calculation happening behind those dark eyes and I don’t know what variables she’s plugging in but I know I don’t like the answer she’s getting.

What the fuck are you seeing?

“I can see it,” she says, smiling wider. “Same energy, different frequency.”

“We don’t have the same anything,” I say.

“Sure you don’t.” She turns back to Cade and says something about the tree price and I load it onto the truck bed by myself.

If I don’t put my hands on something heavy in the next five seconds I’m going to grab Cade by the collar and slam him face-first into the tailgate until the metal dents around his skull and then ask Jules if she still thinks we have the same energy.

The tree is heavier than I expected. I shove it into the bed and the branches scratch my forearms. I tie it down with the rope that’s coiled behind the cab and I pull the knots. I’m halfway through the second knot when Jules leans close to Cade.

Fuck.

She’s asking for it.

Jules glances at me over Cade’s shoulder. Her expression is not subtle.

Another quarter mile of dark road. The heater still doesn’t work and the cab is still freezing and Cade’s mouth is doing the thing where it curves at one corner like he’s holding a joke between his teeth and waiting for the right moment to let it out.

“Her exact words,” he says, and his voice is calm and unhurried and I know before he finishes the sentence that I’m going to rip the rearview mirror off the windshield and put it through his skull, “were that she’s always fantasized about two brothers.”

The silence that follows is so dense I can hear my own blood.

Every muscle from my ribs to my hips tightens and I stare at the dark road and my brain builds the room before I can stop it.

The cabin. A fireplace. Jules between us, her dark hair loose, looking over her shoulder at me while Cade stands behind her with his hands on her waist and his eyes on me.

Because that’s how it would go, isn’t it? She’d be the buffer…

Will you fucking stop?

I shift in my seat, cross my arms, press my wrist against my lap and pray the pressure hides what’s happening. “Absolutely fucking not.”

“She’s attractive.” He looks at me when he says it. Full on, no pretense.

His expression is the most punchable thing I’ve ever witnessed.

“I don’t care what she is.” It comes out like gravel dragged across glass.

His eyes drop down to where my arms are crossed too tight. I see him clock it — the slight narrowing, the almost imperceptible flicker of satisfaction that crosses his face.

The fucker knows.

“You used to care what girls are.” He says it soft.

I turn and look at him for the first time in days and the impact of his face hits me like a wall. The jaw. The mouth. The split on his bottom lip.

He holds my gaze for two seconds before looking back at the road. The curve at the corner of his mouth deepens.

“I told her you’d be there.”