Hurt me like you need me novel Chapter 22

Cade’s POV

Here’s what I know that nobody at this table knows: Sawyer wants to go to that party.

He wants it so fucking badly his body gave him away in the truck like a dog that can’t stop wagging its tail at the thing it’s been told not to chase.

The shift in his seat. The arms crossed too tight over his own lap. The way he pressed his wrist down against himself like I can’t see the outline of what’s happening in his jeans from eighteen inches away.

He wants Jules’s cabin and the dark and whatever sick little scenario his brain is building out of the pieces I’ve been shoving into his mouth for weeks.

He wants it and he’ll die before he admits it because Dale Drum’s son doesn’t reach for things that feel good.

At this point, I bet he’s starving. Starving and too proud and too damaged and too busy playing the martyr to feed himself.

And I’m the only person in this house who can see it because I’m the one who made him hungry. I put the first meal in front of him in that attic and he’s been refusing to eat ever since and it’s pissing me off.

So I’ll do what I always do. I’ll shove it down his throat.

I’ll make the decision for him and he’ll hate me for being right.

But timing is everything. You don’t drop a request into a room, you drop it into a moment.

Diane’s hands are full. My father is relaxed from two glasses of wine and the warmth of being in his parents’ house. Linda is mid-laugh about something George said.

The room is soft. Defenses are down.

“Jules from the tree lot invited us to her friend’s cabin tonight.”

I say it to the room, not to Sawyer. I don’t even look at him. Looking at him would make it a question between us. Making it a question between us gives him room to say no.

I need the room to say yes for him.

Richard takes the bait first. “That sounds great. You boys should go.”

“I don’t think—” Sawyer starts.

“You should,” Dad says, and there’s that fatherly weight he puts on things when he thinks he’s being encouraging. “You’re on winter break. Go make friends. Enjoy yourselves.”

Linda nods. “It would be good for you to get out, honey.”

I watch Sawyer’s jaw lock from across the table.

He’s trapped. Saying no to a party is easy. Saying no to a party that his mother and stepfather and step-grandparents have all endorsed at the dinner table on a holiday visit — that requires a scene.

And Sawyer doesn’t make scenes in other people’s houses. Not with Diane’s good china still on the table and George refilling coffee cups.

“Fine.” He says it like he is agreeing to his own sentencing. “One hour.”

“Take the truck again,” Diane says, setting a cup in front of me. “Drive safe.”

“Always.”

***

The address is twenty minutes into the woods on a road that doesn’t have a name, just a number. The truck rattles over frozen dirt and the headlights catch nothing but trees and the occasional mailbox leaning at an angle.

Sawyer hasn’t spoken since we got in. His arms are crossed and his body is pressed against the passenger door and he’s radiating hostility.

“I’m not drinking,” he says when the cabin lights appear through the trees. “Someone has to drive back.”

“I’m not going back tonight.”

His head turns. His eyes are dark and flat. This is the Dale Drum version of Sawyer. The one that bites.

“Where exactly do you plan on sleeping?” He spits it out like the words taste rotten.

I pull into the clearing and park behind a line of trucks and don’t answer.

The cabin is small — more of a hunting lodge, really. Wood frame, wraparound porch, smoke coming from a chimney that leans slightly to the right. The windows glow yellow and I can hear the bass from here, muffled, like a heartbeat buried under snow.

He’s not asking where I plan to sleep. He’s asking who I plan to sleep with, and the fact that he can’t say it out loud is doing something ugly to his face.

She looks good. She knows she looks good. She knows I know she looks good.

Oh, this is going to be difficult.

Jules leads us toward the fireplace and introduces us to a rotation of locals whose names I know I will forget in an hour.

Connor, the one who owns the cabin, is a bearded, friendly guy who calls everyone “brother.” And there is girl named Sam who’s studying something at a state school and keeps touching Sawyer’s shoulder when she talks to him.

Twenty minutes in, he hasn’t touched the cup. Jules refills mine and I nurse it and wait. Connor tells a story about a bear that got into his truck last summer and the room laughs and Sawyer’s mouth twitches with a ghost of a smile.

Sam touches his arm again and says something about his jacket and Sawyer says thanks and takes his first sip. The grimace tells me he doesn’t like the whiskey. But he drinks more anyway.

By the time he accepts his second cup — this one from Connor, who pours heavy — Sawyer’s shoulders have dropped two inches from his ears. His voice is loosening.

He’s not relaxed, exactly. But the Dale Drum mask is sliding sideways and underneath it is a twenty-one-year-old kid at a party who doesn’t know how to have fun.

He turns to say something to Sam. His back is to me. His cup is on the counter at his elbow. The room is loud and nobody is watching me.

I reach into my jacket pocket. The pill case is small — brushed silver, the size of a lighter. I’ve carried it everywhere since I was nineteen because of my shoulder impingement.

Every competitive swimmer gets it eventually, the rotator cuff grinding against the bone on every stroke, thousands of repetitions a day.

Some mornings I can’t lift my arm above my head for the first ten minutes. Coach knows. The team doesn’t. Showing pain is showing weakness and I don’t show weakness to people I haven’t decided to trust, which is everyone.

Tonight, it carries a certain… powder.

I pop the case open under the counter and tap a dusting into Sawyer’s cup. Then into mine. The powder settles into the whiskey. Disappears.

I take a sip of my own and lean against the counter and wait.