Hurt me like you need me novel Chapter 7

Sawyer’s POV

I come back from my run wired and soaked in sweat, heart hammering against my ribs like it’s trying to get out. Six miles in the dark. Full sprint for the last two.

My lungs burn and my legs are shaking and none of it did what it was supposed to do, which is empty my head of Cade Ellory for more than thirty consecutive seconds.

The house is dark when I walk in. Parents are out. Their car is gone, kitchen light off. I take the stairs two at a time, strip my shirt off in the hallway, and push into the bathroom.

That’s when I hear a girl moaning.

The sound is coming from Cade’s bedroom. His door is cracked open, just an inch, lamplight spilling through the gap onto the bathroom tile.

The sound comes again — high, breathy, rhythmic, muffled but clear enough that there’s no mistaking what’s happening on the other side.

Don’t look. Don’t you fucking dare look.

But the wet and breathless sound keeps coming, and it’s the one I’ve never once pulled out of a girl in twenty-one years.

Every girl I’ve been with has gone quiet eventually, the enthusiasm draining out of her voice when she realized I wasn’t going to give her what she came for.

I want to see what it looks like. I want to see her face — the way her mouth opens, the way her body arches, the way she grips the sheets.

I need to memorize whatever it is that makes a girl sound like she’s losing her mind so I can replicate it with Kaylee at the Halloween party.

That’s the only reason I look.

Through the gap I can see the edge of Cade’s bed. The girl is on her back with her legs wrapped around his waist and her head tipped back and her mouth open. Her nails rake down his back, leaving red lines across the skin.

“Choke me,” she moans. “Please, Cade, I want you to choke me.”

I watch Cade’s hand leave the headboard and close around her throat without hesitation, like he’s been waiting for permission he didn’t need, and she moans so loud the sound fills the bathroom and I stop breathing.

Cade’s back is to me. Bare, broad, the muscles shifting under his skin with every thrust. His swimmer’s shoulders flex and roll and there’s a sheen of sweat across his spine that catches the lamplight.

Then he goes harder. I hear the wet slap of skin on skin picking up speed, the headboard knocking into the wall in a faster rhythm, the mattress springs protesting under the force of it.

The girl makes a choked sound like the air’s been punched out of her lungs and her legs tighten around his waist.

I’m watching the line of his spine. The dip at the base of his back. The way his ass flexes when he drives forward. The tendons in his forearm where he grips the headboard so hard the wood creaks.

My dick is hard. Fully, painfully hard, straining against my running shorts, and I didn’t even feel it happen.

I force myself to shut the door. Press it closed until the latch clicks, make sure it’s sealed. Turn the shower on hot enough to scald and step under the spray.

I brace both hands on the tile and drop my head and try to think about Kaylee. Try to picture her bikini, her texts, her photo. Try to build the fantasy — her body, her mouth, her hand on my stomach.

Nothing. Dead air. My dick doesn’t even twitch for the thought of her.

Through the wall, the moaning grows louder. The headboard picks up speed. Then the girl’s voice comes through the tile, loud enough that she either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that these walls are thin as paper.

“Oh fuck, you’re so deep —”

My hand tightens on the tile.

“You’re so big, Cade, oh my god—”

She moans his name like it’s being ripped out of her, and my cock jerks so hard I have to grab the base of it to keep from losing my mind.

I hear her beg him to go harder and my brain replaces her with the bathroom floor, the party, his weight on top of me, and the question I can’t stop asking myself: what would it sound like if he said my name like that?

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.

Imagine what you’d fuck like if you stopped fighting it.

My grip is too tight. I know it’s too tight and I don’t loosen it. I want it to hurt. I want the friction to burn so I can tell myself that I’m getting it out of my system like you’d drain poison from a wound — ugly and necessary and nothing more.

Still nothing. Not a voice, not a footstep, not a bedspring. Just the shower hitting tile and my own breathing coming too fast and too loud in the small space.

They heard me. She heard me. He heard me.

Or maybe the water was loud enough. Maybe the shower covered it. Maybe they were still going when I —

No. The silence is too complete.

Fuck me twice.

I turn the water off.

I reach for the towel and wrap it around my waist with hands that won’t stop trembling. Wipe the fog from my eyes.

My legs are shaking. My throat is tight. I just jerked off to the sound of my stepbrother fucking someone, and I came harder than I’ve ever come in my life.

I turn toward Cade’s door.

It’s open.

My stomach drops through the floor. I did close it.

Did Cade open it? Was he in here? Did he see my face when I came?

Did he walk in to trash the condom? To wash his hands? To take a piss? Any of a hundred normal reasons that a person walks into a shared bathroom after sex.

What if he didn’t walk in? What if he opened the door and just left it?

What if he wanted me to listen?