Hurt me like you need me novel Chapter 24

Cade’s POV

Her mouth is on his neck and his eyes are on me.

The lamp throws amber across everything. Skin turns gold. Shadows pool in the hollows of collarbones and the dips between ribs and the air is thick with heat and whiskey-breath and the faint chemical sweetness of molly bleeding through three sets of pores.

“Hey.” Jules’s voice against Sawyer’s throat. Her fingers trailing down his chest. “We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”

He is tense. Every muscle locked, jaw grinding, hands hovering at her waist like he’s holding something he’s afraid will shatter if he grips it. But his eyes don’t move off me. Dark and wide and asking a question his mouth won’t form.

“He wants to,” I say from the edge of the bed. “He just doesn’t know how to start.”

“Fuck you,” Sawyer breathes, but the molly’s eaten the venom. What’s left is raw and open and looking at me like I’m the permission he needs.

“You can leave.” I keep my voice level. “Walk out. Nobody’s keeping you.”

He doesn’t move.

“That’s what I thought.”

Jules reads the room faster than either of us deserves. She looks between us — that sharp calculation behind the warmth — and adjusts.

“Come here,” she tells him, soft, the voice you’d use with something feral. Her hand finds his jaw and turns his face toward hers.

He goes.

Jules pulls him down onto the bed and he follows, stiff and uncertain. She guides his palm flat against her stomach and holds it there.

“Feel that?” she says, and his fingers spread and his breathing changes and I hear it from the edge of the bed like a wire being plucked.

She’s patient with him. I wouldn’t have expected that from a girl who whispered a threesome fantasy to a stranger at a tree lot.

She reads the tension in his shoulders and works around it — laughing when his elbow catches the headboard, redirecting his hands when they freeze, kissing the hinge of his jaw until the grinding in his teeth softens into something that’s almost relaxation.

“There,” she murmurs against his throat. “Like that.”

His back arches off the mattress.

He listens. His body responds to her voice violently, imprecisely, all raw horsepower and no technique. His hands find her hips and pull and Jules gasps and the sound of it fills the room and his eyes.

His eyes are still on me.

Are you watching?

I’m watching.

“Get over here.” Jules reaches for me without lifting her mouth from Sawyer’s throat. Her hand finds the front of my shirt and pulls and the fabric stretches.

The mattress dips under my weight. Jules shifts, and then she’s between us. Her back against my chest. Sawyer in front of her.

The three of us pressed together and I can feel both of their heartbeats through her body, hers fast and light and his heavy and hammering, and the heat coming off Sawyer’s skin passes through Jules and into me like a current.

“Both of you,” Jules says.

Her head falls back against my shoulder. Sawyer’s forehead drops against hers.

Jules reaches back and finds my hip. Then she pulls me forward, her hand on Sawyer, positioning him, her breath hitching as he presses close.

Then her other hand finds me and draws me in behind her and the moment I feel the heat of him through the thin wall of her body, my vision narrows to a pinpoint.

We’re both inside her and the distance between us is a membrane. I can feel him move and he can feel me move and every thrust translates through her.

And then we’re moving and Jules makes a sound that starts in her chest and ends somewhere in the base of my skull and Sawyer’s hand shoots past her hip and grabs mine.

The proximity is unbearable. Through Jules I can feel him — the movement of his body, the rhythm of his breathing, the heat pouring off his skin in waves.

We are separated by inches and every inch is full of her and still it’s not enough distance to keep my body from responding to his.

Sawyer’s hand tightens on mine. Our fingers interlace against Jules’s hip. His knuckles are white and his pulse is in his palm and I can count the beats and every beat says you, you, you.

We break apart. His arm goes back across his face. The wall can’t go up — the molly won’t allow it — but something shifts behind his eyes when Jules opens the door.

I know what just happened. I’ll spend the rest of my life deciding what it means.

“Miss me?” Jules slides between us.

“Desperately.” My voice is steady. My hands are not.

The rest of the night belongs to her and she’s earned it. She falls asleep between us with her hair across the pillow and her hand curled against Sawyer’s chest.

She might be the kindest person either of us has touched in months.

I wait thirty minutes, counting their breaths until they become deep.

Then I reach for my phone. The screen lights up blue-white in the dark. The camera is one tap away.

I take the photo.

One frame. His face. The sheets. The context that could destroy him.

His face on the screen is slack, jaw unclenched, unguarded, and something rises in my throat that I haven’t felt since I held my mother’s hand and it went cold.

What do you want to happen, Cade?

I want to delete the photo. I want to be the person who deletes it.

I lock the phone and don’t delete it.