Hurt me like you need me novel Chapter 28

Sawyer’s POV

I don’t take a jacket or my phone. I walk out in the shirt I bled on and start running before I’ve made it past the mailbox.

January evening, no sun, air cold enough to split skin, my ribs screaming where Cade’s fist connected, and I lean into the pain because it’s the only thing in my body that makes sense.

My legs pick the route. Same campus loop, same quarter-mile stretch where the streetlights thin and the trees press in, and I’m running faster than I should because slowing down means the photo and the photo means my mother’s face and my mother’s face is the only thought in the world that could make me run faster than I already am.

The athletic fields appear on my left, dark and empty. The path curves around the maintenance shed where the lights don’t reach for about forty yards.

I round the bend.

The hands come from behind.

Arms locking around my chest from behind, one across my torso, the other hooking my shoulder. The grip is huge. Wide hands, long fingers. He outweighs me by forty pounds and knows how to use every one of them.

My feet leave the ground for half a second before I’m dragged backward and my spine hits a chest, broad, breathing hard behind a balaclava.

Then a voice. Low, muffled through the fabric, but close enough to my ear that the warmth of his breath hits my neck. “Missed me?”

Two words and my body short-circuits. I know that voice.

The attic. The dark room. The floor.

Not again.

The difference is that last time I froze. Last time the stranger grabbed me and my body locked and my arms stopped working and I lay facedown on dusty floorboards while someone took what they wanted.

This time I fight.

I throw my elbow backward. It connects with something hard — ribs, sternum — and the grip loosens for a fraction of a second.

I spin. My fist finds the side of his head through the balaclava and the impact sends a shockwave up my arm. He staggers. I tackle him.

We hit the grass. Wet, frozen, the cold soaking through my jeans instantly. We roll — his weight on me, then mine on him — grappling for position.

His gloved hand finds my throat. I slap it away and drive my knee into his thigh and he grunts — a sound I know, a sound that lives in the part of my memory I’ve been trying to drown for months.

I grab his wrist and twist and his body rolls and I’m on top, straddling his chest. Knees on his biceps. The same position he had me in on the attic floor.

Now we are reversed.

He goes still underneath me. His chest rises and falls under my weight and his eyes behind the balaclava are dark and steady and looking up at me with an expression I can’t read through the fabric but can feel through every point of contact between his body and mine.

He’s waiting.

My hands are on his chest. My breathing is ragged and my ribs are screaming and my knuckles are split from hitting him and the adrenaline is doing something to my blood that feels identical to the thing the molly did — walls dissolving, gaps closing, the distance between wanting and doing collapsing to nothing.

I should hit him. I should rip the balaclava off his face and find out who’s been destroying my life since Halloween and beat him until his face matches the wreckage he’s made of mine.

My hand moves to the mask. My fingers hook under the edge at his jaw.

I stop.

If I pull this off, I’ll know.

And knowing means the stranger becomes a person with a face and a name. Someone I’ll have to look at in a hallway or across a pool deck.

Don’t think about that. This is not him.

I can’t finish. The sentence has an ending and the ending is ‘I don’t want it to stop’ and that admission is the most terrifying thing I’ve ever almost said.

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