Hurt me like you need me novel Chapter 8

The Delta Sig house looks like hell threw a costume party. Fake cobwebs on every surface, strobe lights cutting through fog machines, bass heavy enough to rattle the cups on every flat surface.

I’m dressed as nothing — jeans, black shirt, the bare minimum to not get turned away at the door. I didn’t come here for Halloween. I came here for Kaylee.

But she’s not here.

I check my phone for the fourth time in ten minutes, leaning against the kitchen counter while bodies filter past me in masks and face paint.

Me: I’m here. Where are you?

Three dots. Then nothing. Then three dots again.

Kaylee: Running late!! 20 min tops. Don’t leave.

I do the math. The pills are in my jacket pocket, two blue tablets in a ziplock bag I’ve been carrying around like a dirty secret for two weeks.

The recommended dose is one tablet, thirty minutes before. Twenty minutes isn’t thirty. I need to take them now, but if she’s twenty minutes out and I take them now and she’s actually forty minutes out, the window closes.

If she walks through the door in ten and I haven’t taken them yet, I’m fucked. Literally not fucked. Quite the opposite of fucked.

“Sawyer! Yo, Sawyer!” The voice comes from my right.

I look up. Marco Reeves pushes through the crowd with a red cup and a vampire cape. Behind him, two guys from my econ class whose names I can’t remember.

“Dude, I didn’t know you were coming.” Danny claps my shoulder and leans against the counter. “You here alone? Where’s your brother?”

And there it is. Thirty seconds into a conversation and we’ve already arrived at the fuckface. Every interaction on this campus follows the same script these days: hi Sawyer, where’s Cade?

“Stepbrother.” I correct him. “And I don’t know where he is.”

“I saw him at the pool today, he was on fire. Coach says he might break the conference record this season.” Danny shakes his head, grinning. “Must be crazy living with that guy. Like sharing a house with a celebrity.”

“It’s definitely something.”

The understatement of a century.

“Seriously though, how do you handle it? Everyone on campus knows Cade Ellory. You walk into a room and people are like, oh, that’s Cade’s brother.” He takes a sip of his drink, oblivious to the way my jaw is tightening. “No offense.”

“None taken.” I take a long pull of whatever’s in my cup. It burns going down.

One of the econ guys leans in. “Is it true he’s hooking up with that girl from the volleyball team? Or is he back on guys? I can never keep track.”

“I don’t keep track of who my stepbrother fucks.” It comes out loud enough that the girl standing behind Danny turns her head.

“Fair enough.” Danny laughs. “Anyway, if you see him, tell him Marco from the team is looking for him.”

They drift away. I pull out my phone.

Kaylee: Almost there babe. 10 min. I hope you’re ready for me 🍆

Ten minutes. Fuck.

I reach into my jacket pocket and close my fingers around the ziplock. The recommended dose is one but I do need this to work.

I can’t afford another night of going soft while a girl’s hand is down my pants, another morning of lying in bed staring at the ceiling wondering what’s wrong with me.

I fish both pills out and dry-swallow them. They scrape down my throat on the way down.

Two more drinks, and I’m buzzing now — the alcohol and the pills and the nerves mixing into something that makes the room tilt at the edges.

My phone vibrates.

Kaylee: Change of plans. I set up a little game for you before we meet. Call it foreplay 🌶 Go to the second floor hallway. There’s a note taped to the mirror.

I stare at the screen. Setting up a game is either the hottest thing anyone’s ever done for me or the weirdest, and right now I’m too wired to care which.

The game takes me through the house. A note taped to the second-floor mirror sends me to a bedroom where a polaroid is tucked under the pillow — a girl’s bare stomach, just the strip of skin between a hiked-up shirt and low-slung jeans, with an arrow drawn in marker pointing down and the words keep going scrawled underneath.

The next clue is in the bathroom cabinet: a pair of lace underwear wrapped around a key, still warm. The key opens a hallway closet where another note is pinned to the wall in the dark: You’re close. I’m wet. Attic stairs, end of the hall. Don’t turn on the light.

“Kaylee, right? No strings attached.” He says it slow, reciting the details like he’s reading them off a screen. Like he’s — “She told you to come to the attic. Left you notes and her underwear.” His knee presses harder into my spine. “Who do you think wrote them?”

My blood goes absent. Like every drop just left my body at once and I’m hollow, lying facedown on the floorboards with my chin split open and a stranger’s weight on my back, and the room is spinning so hard I can’t tell which way is up.

“There is no Kaylee, you moron.” His voice drops lower. “I’ve been watching you for a while, Sawyer. Long enough to know what you actually need, even if you’re too chickenshit to admit it to yourself.”

“Shut the fuck up.” I try to buck him off but he’s got fifty pounds on me and my arms are pinned. “Get off me or I swear to God I’ll kill you.”

“You need a dick.”

“I said shut the fuck—”

He flips me over. I swing blind — my fist connects with something, jawbone maybe, and I feel his blood drip onto my face.

Everything is dark and wet and the pills have my cock so hard it hurts and that has nothing to do with this, nothing to do with him, it’s the pills, it’s chemistry, it’s—

He leans down and licks the blood off my chin. A long, flat stroke of his tongue from my jaw to the corner of my mouth.

My body locks.

Every muscle freezes like someone pulled the plug on whatever part of my brain controls my limbs and left only the part that registers sensation.

His tongue is warm and wet and tastes like copper and the sound that escapes my throat is obscene to my own ears.

His hands move to my belt. I should stop him. I should break his fingers and shove him off me and put my fist through his skull. But my body won’t move.

He undoes my buckle and pulls me free. The cold air hits me and I flinch — the only movement my body allows. Then his mouth closes over me and my brain whites out.