Hurt me like you need me novel Chapter 25

Sawyer’s POV

I wake up with my skull trying to split itself open from the inside.

The first thing I register is light, gray and cold. It seeps through curtains that don’t close all the way. I squeeze my eyes shut and the darkness behind my lids pulses red with every heartbeat.

The second thing is warmth against my left side. A soft body, breathing slow, an arm draped across my stomach with chipped nail polish on the fingers.

Definitely not Cade.

The relief lasts exactly as long as it takes my brain to start assembling the pieces.

The cabin. The fireplace. Connor’s whiskey. The molly in the cup that I finished anyway because I wanted the walls to come down.

I got what I wanted and now the walls are rubble and I’m lying in the wreckage trying to figure out which parts of last night actually happened and which parts the molly invented.

Jules. The stairs. The amber light. Her voice and the heat of two bodies pressed against hers and the sound she made when—

I close my eyes. My stomach turns — a slow, wet roll that starts below my navel and climbs toward my throat and I have to breathe through my nose for ten seconds to keep the whiskey from making a second appearance on these sheets.

Then the last piece falls.

Cade’s mouth on mine. Alone on the bed. No girl between us. No molly to blame it on because molly doesn’t make you kiss someone — it makes you stop pretending you don’t want to.

His lips. My hands on his jaw, holding his face like — like what, Sawyer?

Like you wanted him to go on? Like you’ve been dreaming about this exact thing for months and the drug just removed the lock you’ve been hiding behind?

I held his face with both hands.

I pulled him closer.

I made a sound.

The memory of that obscene sound makes me want to peel my own skin off.

I sit up, and the room tilts. My skin feels wrong — too thin, too exposed, like the molly scraped off a protective layer overnight and now every nerve is firing at the surface.

My tongue is glued to the roof of my mouth. My sinuses feel packed with cement. There’s a bruise on my hip that I don’t remember getting and when I press it the pain blooms hot and immediate and the room swims again.

The sheets are damp under my palms. My mouth tastes like something died in it and was buried under whiskey.

Jules stirs beside me, her hair fanned across the pillow, but she doesn’t wake.

She looks peaceful and warm. She will remember last night as an adventure and not a crime scene and I envy her so much it makes my teeth ache.

My clothes are on the floor. Jeans by the nightstand. Shirt under the chair. One shoe by the door, the other under the bed.

I dress with hands that won’t stop shaking, buttoning wrong, starting over, pulling my shirt on inside out and not fixing it. My fingers feel fat and foreign.

I don’t look at the other side of the bed.

I don’t look because looking means acknowledging that there’s a dent in the pillow where a third person slept and that person was Cade and at some point in the night my hand was in his hand and our fingers were interlaced and I can still feel the shape of his knuckles against my palm.

The stairs creak under my feet. Each step sends a jolt through my skull and my body can’t decide if it’s hungover or still high — everything is too bright, too loud, the grain of the wooden banister too detailed under my fingertips.

Downstairs, the cabin is wrecked — red cups on every surface, someone asleep on the couch with a jacket over their face, the fireplace dead and cold, the whole room smelling like stale smoke and spilled whiskey and the sour aftermath of a party that went too long.

Cade is in the kitchen.

He’s standing at the counter with his back to me, pouring coffee from a pot he apparently made himself because of course he did.

Even in a stranger’s cabin the morning after the worst night of my life, Cade Ellory finds the coffee maker and operates it like he has never been caught off guard by anything, ever.

This smile is open and unguarded and almost boyish and it reaches his eyes in a way I’ve only seen before his mother died.

“Don’t say morning to me like we’re…I can’t finish the sentence. The ending is a word I can’t say in this kitchen in this life. “Just don’t fucking touch me.”

Cade stops. His eyes search my face and I let him look because I can’t hide what’s there.

It’s disgust, pure and uncut, that starts in your stomach and climbs into your throat and sits behind your teeth like bile.

And it’s aimed entirely at myself.

He sees it. I watch him see it. I watch his expression shift from hopeful to confused to something that looks like the beginning of a wound he doesn’t know how to dress.

“Sawyer, about last night—”

“It didn’t happen.”

The words again. The same ones from the bathroom after the first kiss.

I’m building the same wall with the same bricks and I know it won’t hold and I’m building it anyway because the alternative is standing in this kitchen and admitting that I held Cade Ellory’s face in my hands and kissed him and wanted more.

The truck keys are on the counter. I pick them up. The metal is cold in my palm.

“You’re not driving,” he says. “You’re still—”

“Watch me.”

I walk out.