Hurt me like you need me novel Chapter 9

“I will find out who you are.” My voice comes out wrecked, scraped raw against my own teeth. “And when I do, I will break every bone in your fucking face.”

He doesn’t stop. The pills have turned my blood into something chemical and traitorous and my hips jerk against the floor no matter how hard I lock my legs.

My arms are pinned under his knees — his weight is on my biceps, grinding bone into the floorboards, and my fingers are going numb. The only part of me that’s free is my voice.

“You hear me? I’ll kill you. I’ll find you and I’ll kill you.”

He pulls off long enough to speak. “You talk a lot.” His voice is flat, muffled — pitched low or naturally deep, I can’t tell. His breath is hot against my skin.

The dark strips everything to texture. No face, no features. Just weight and heat and his hands adjusting their grip on my thighs.

“When I get my arms free—”

“You won’t.”

“I will break your jaw and your nose and every fucking tooth in your—”

“Keep going.” He sounds almost bored. “I like you like this.”

“Fuck you.”

“Wrong way around.”

His mouth closes over me again and my skull hits the floor. Dust kicks up into my nose. I stare at the ceiling I can’t see and dig my fingers into the floorboards under his knees, splinters pushing into my nails.

I focus on the pain because the alternative is the pressure building at the base of my spine, this tightening heat that keeps climbing no matter what I do. My shirt is soaked through. I can feel every grain of the floor against my shoulder blades.

“Stop.” My jaw is shaking.

He adjusts his angle and the pressure doubles and my back arches off the floor.

“My body is on drugs,” I say, and my voice breaks in the middle. “The pills — I took pills, this isn’t—”

“I know about the pills.”

Of course you do.

Of course the guy who built a fake girl and lured me to a dark room also knows I can’t get hard without help. He probably thinks that’s funny.

He probably even thinks it proves whatever sick theory he has about what I need.

I open my mouth to say something else and nothing comes out. My jaw is clenched so tight my molars grind.

The floor vibrates under my back with the bass from downstairs and the vibration meets the pressure that’s already building and my legs start shaking. Full shaking, knees knocking against the insides of his arms.

My fingers claw flat against the floorboards. I can feel every place his body touches mine — his knees on my arms, his hands on my thighs, and the heat of his mouth that I am not going to think about, I am not going to—

My heels dig into the floor. Every tendon in my neck pulls taut. I hold my breath and clench every muscle I have left because if I can just hold still, if I can just stop my body from—

I come so hard my spine lifts off the floor.

He doesn’t pull off.

He stays through every involuntary pulse and I can feel his throat working — swallowing like he’s making a point.

He takes all of it and the intimacy of that act is worse than everything that came before it because force I can file under violence but this… This is something else. This is someone deciding to keep a part of me inside them and I will never get it back.

My stomach folds in on itself.

He sits back. His hand drags across his mouth with a wet click of lips parting.

The floorboards shift as he leans close, breath warm against my ear, and when he speaks his voice is soft.

“I’ll be back,” he breathes. “Be a good boy. Try not to miss me.”

And just like that, his weight lifts. I hear unhurried footsteps cross the attic floor.

The door opens and for a half-second I try to see him against the backlight but my eyes have been in the dark too long. All I get is a tall, broad shape. Then the door shuts and I’m alone with my jeans around my thighs and blood in my mouth.

I yank my jeans up, fumble the button, and throw myself at the door.

The hallway is empty. Strobe light pulses up the staircase. I look left, right, down the corridor. Nobody is there except a girl in a nurse costume sitting on the floor outside a bedroom, scrolling her phone with one shoe off.

“Hey.” My voice sounds like someone stepped on it. “Did you see someone come out of this door just now?”

She looks up. Glances at the attic door, then at my chin. “You’re bleeding.”

Twenty minutes. She’s been six feet from that door while I was — while THAT was happening — and she didn’t hear a thing over the music.

The last message is hers. His. The clue about the attic.

How long was he watching me?

Did he find my Tinder first, or see me at the party and set the trap in real time?

Does he go to this college?

Was he downstairs, watching me check my phone for a girl who doesn’t exist?

Male, obviously. Taller by at least two inches — six-three, maybe more. Strong enough to pin me one-handed. Athlete. He knew about the Kaylee profile, which means he built the whole thing from scratch. Weeks of flirting. For me.

Why?

Why me?

Who the fuck looks at Sawyer Drum and decides he’s worth that kind of effort?

Then why can you still feel his throat when he swallowed?

“A man handles his business, Sawyer. A man doesn’t cry about it.” He said that when I was eleven with a black eye from a kid twice my size. “You go back tomorrow and hit him twice as hard. That’s what Drum men do.”

They don’t feel the thing I’m feeling right now, this sick twist that isn’t just horror.

“You’re my boy. You’re tough. You’re not like those—”

And the memory cuts off because the word he used next is the word he always used and it lives in my chest like a fishhook that rusts a little more every year.

The driveway is dark. I sit in the car while the engine ticks.

I could go to the cops.

Tell them what — that I took erectile dysfunction pills, followed a catfish to a dark room, and got off?

My mother would find out. Cade would find out. Dale would find out because the universe is built to make sure his son never outgrows the lesson plan.

Upstairs, past my mother’s bedroom, past the bathroom between my room and Cade’s. Lock my door. Lock the bathroom door. Shower on full heat, standing under it fully clothed until the water soaks through everything.

I strip and scrub until my skin is raw.

When the water is ice I turn it off. Stand in the dark dripping onto the mat. I can still feel his mouth. The way my body stopped fighting and started — no.

Stopped fighting. End of sentence.

I sit on the edge of my bed. The wall between my room and Cade’s is thin. Usually I hear his music, his footsteps, his light switch. Tonight it’s silent.

My phone buzzes on the nightstand. It’s Kaylee’s number.

Kaylee: Sweet dreams, Sawyer.