Hurt me like you need me novel Chapter 23

Sawyer’s POV

I know it’s molly when my jaw unclenches for the first time in nine days.

All at once — like someone reached into my skull and cut the wire that’s been holding my teeth together since I kissed my stepbrother.

My shoulders drop. My hands unclench. The firelight turns liquid and the bass in the floor climbs into my chest and sits there like a second heartbeat, warm and patient, and I look down at the cup in my hand and think oh.

I know this taste. I know this warmth.

I know this feeling like you know the layout of a house you grew up in — by feel, in the dark, without needing to see the walls to know where they are.

Eighteen years old. The week everything went to shit at once. Monday the judge says five years and my mother grips the bench in front of her so hard her knuckles go white and my father doesn’t turn around to look at us.

They lead him out through a side door and the last thing I see is the back of his head and the way his shoulders don’t drop. Like he expected this.

Wednesday I show up to practice and my name’s not on the board. Coach pulls me aside and says Cade Ellory is replacing me.

‘We had to make a call, Sawyer. It’s nothing personal.’

Everything is personal when your father just got sentenced and the one thing you were good at got handed to someone whose last name you’ll be sharing in a few years.

Thursday I slam my locker so hard the hinges bend and a kid named Shane, who’s been watching me do this for a week, leans against the one next to it and says, ‘You look like you could use a break from being you.’

The first time was in Shane’s car in the school parking lot. I sat in the passenger seat and waited and twenty minutes later the world turned into something I could stand to be inside. The radio sounded like it was playing just for me.

And all of it — the judge’s voice saying five years, the back of my father’s head, Ellory’s name on the board, Coach’s hand on my shoulder — went quiet.

I sat in that Honda Civic and cried for twenty minutes and Shane didn’t say a word and it was the best I’d felt since before the trial.

After that I swallowed pills in bathroom stalls between classes. At my mother’s kitchen table while she talked about selling the house and I sat there with warm hands and a quiet skull feeling like a human being instead of a bomb.

Fuck you, Dad. Fuck you and your goddamn rules.

I was clean by junior year because Mom found the baggie in my jacket pocket when she was doing laundry and she sat on my bed and held it in her palm and looked at me with an expression I will spend the rest of my life trying to forget.

She didn’t yell. She said Sawyer and the way she said it was enough. I flushed what I had. Never touched it again.

I’ve thought about it. Every rough week, every 2 AM ceiling stare, every morning I ran six miles trying to outpace something I can’t outrun — I thought about it.

But I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. Because the image of her disappointed face holding that baggie is burned into my retinas and I will not be the reason she makes that face again.

But tonight I didn’t choose this.

Someone put it in my cup. Someone at this party dropped it in while I was talking to Sam. I didn’t buy it. I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t decide.

This one doesn’t count.

The relief that floods through me is so strong my knees almost buckle.

It’s already in my blood and there’s no fighting it and I didn’t do this to myself, Mom, I swear, someone else made this decision and I’m just…

I’m just standing here letting it happen.

Thank you. I think it at whoever did it. Thank you for making a decision I’ve been too much of a coward to make for years.

I scan the room. Twenty faces I don’t know. Connor on the couch. Jules by the kitchen. Sam by the window.

Who would do it?

The question dissolves before it forms. That’s what the molly does — it makes you stop caring about the things that should make you careful. The paranoia melts. The walls soften. The calculus of is this safe, should I run goes silent.

I don’t decide to go there. My legs take me. The gap between wanting and doing — the gap where Sawyer Drum says no to everything his body says yes to — is gone.

Fingers pressing into the bone above my waistband with a grip I have felt before.

His mouth is right there. An inch from mine. Eyes half-closed. Lips parted. The split from my teeth is still visible on his bottom lip and his mouth is dry, cracked at the corners, tongue darting out to wet them.

He’s rolling too.

Which means he spiked my cup. And it looks like he spiked his own. Whatever he put in my drink he swallowed too and now we’re both high, both loose, both standing with our bodies pressed together and our pupils blown wide and neither of us has the hardware to stop what’s about to happen.

We match.

The room is loud and full of people and I don’t care. Jules and Connor and Sam and twenty strangers are furniture pushed against the walls of a room that has shrunk to the size of the space between his mouth and mine.

The only real thing left is his mouth one inch from mine and his hands on my hips and the bass vibrating through us like a shared nervous system.

I tilt my chin. His breath catches. Half an inch between our mouths and I can feel the warmth of his lips without touching them and—

“There you are.”

Jules.

Her hand is on Cade’s shoulder. Her other hand is finding mine. She’s smiling wide and knowing.

She takes both our hands and pulls us toward the stairs.