Hurt me like you need me novel Chapter 27

I close his door behind me. Turn the lock. The click is small and precise and it changes the room the way a period changes a sentence.

Sawyer is standing by the window with his back to me. His shoulders are up around his ears. He heard the lock.

“Get out.”

“No.”

“Cade.” He turns. His eyes are red-rimmed and dry — the aftermath of tears that already fell and were wiped away before anyone could see them. The hood is still up. His hands are at his sides and his knuckles are white. “Get the fuck out of my room.”

“You’re not leaving this house.”

The laugh that comes out of him is ugly. Short and sharp, like he’s been pushed past the point where anything is funny and has arrived at the place where everything is. “You don’t get to tell me what I do.”

“I’m telling you anyway.”

“And I’m telling you to get the fuck out before I put you through that door.”

I don’t move. I stand with my back against the locked door and watch the distance between where he is and where the violence starts. The distance is shrinking.

“Your mother is downstairs crying into her pancakes. She thinks she’s losing you.”

“She’s not losing me. I’m moving to a dorm, not dying.”

“It’s the same thing to her.”

“That’s not my problem.”

I push off the door. One step. Two. I dismantle the distance in three strides and I’m standing close enough to see the vein in his temple pulsing.

“It’s your problem because you made it your problem when you announced it at the breakfast table instead of having a conversation like an adult.” I say it into his face. Close enough that he has to tilt his chin up to hold my eyes.

His eyes flash. The shift from dead to alive happens in half a second, flatline to voltage, zero to sixty. “Don’t you dare lecture me.”

“Someone has to.”

His chest is heaving. I can see his fists ball at his sides and the tendons jump in his forearms and I know — the way I always know — that he’s seconds from swinging.

I don’t step back. I step closer. One more inch. My chest almost touching his. Daring his body to do what his mouth won’t.

He shoves me.

Both hands on my chest, the heels of his palms driving into my sternum. I stay on my feet. I’ve been hit harder. I’ve been hit by him before.

I shove him back.

My hands hit his shoulders and he stumbles backward into the desk and textbooks crash to the floor and a pen cup tips and scatters across the carpet and the sound of it all fills the room like a detonation.

He grabs my shirt. I grab his. We’re chest to chest and his breath is hot on my face and his eyes are alive for the first time in two days and I hate that I notice this and I hate that the aliveness is the thing I’ve been missing.

He swings first.

Right hook, fast, aimed at my jaw. I block it with my forearm and the impact vibrates through the bone. I drive my fist into his ribs.

He doubles forward and I hit him again in the stomach and his knees buckle and he catches himself on the desk edge and comes back up swinging.

His fist catches my ear. The room rings. I taste copper on my tongue from biting the inside of my cheek.

He’s fast — faster than the last time we fought, the swimming has rebuilt something in his shoulders that wasn’t there in September — but I’m bigger and I’m angrier and the anger is coming from a place I can’t control and don’t want to.

I pin him. Forearm across his throat. Back against the wall. His feet leave the floor for half a second before he finds the ground and his hands claw at my arm and his face goes red above the pressure point.

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