Page 115 of My Sweetest Agony

“I know.” I shove my hands through my hair. “But Drew was always so easy to be like that with. He was so open with everything, with how he was feeling, with what he wanted out of life and from me. It was effortless to do that with him. Cam isn’t like that, and that mystery, that reticence and haunted look in his eyes somehow draws me to him.”

“You can’t fix him, hon.” She raises a concerned brow. “You know that, right?”

Anger flashes hot through my blood, and I clench my fists, glaring at her. “That’s not what I’m trying to do.”

“Aren’t you?” She lets that question settle for a second before she continues. “Cam’s messed up. He said it himself; he warned you. The man was addicted to every drug on the planet, abused all of them, and he’s only been clean for a year. He ruined his relationship with his twin brother, the closest person to him in his life, by finger-fucking you in the goddamn garden of his mother’s house on her birthday, pretending to be him. And you’re honestly going to tell me that this is the man you want to be with? That, what, two months after Drew’s death, you’re ready for all of that?”

Fuck.

Tough love hurts.

I squeeze my eyes closed and shake my head. “No. I’m just saying…” Frustration taking over, I throw up my hands and walk away toward the front windows to stare out at the street again. “I just keep waiting for him to show up. My heart beats faster knowing he will. I don’t know what to do with that, Marlo. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it. Do I ignore it? Pretend it doesn’t exist. Go back to sitting on that couch or lying in my empty bed every night, sobbing and miserable and wishing I could join Drew wherever he is?”

Because that’s what my life had become.

I was drowning in my despair the night Cam appeared on my doorstep, the closest I’ve ever been to doing something unimaginable that couldn’t be taken back.

His arrival saved me, even if it brought a deluge of other problems and questions with it.

Marlo releases a heavy sigh, and I hear the clink of her glass as she sets it on the table and her feet padding over to me. She wraps her arms around me from behind and gives me a squeeze. “I’m sorry. You know I’m only trying to get you to actually see what’s happening, right? I don’t want you falling down some rabbit hole, chasing after some fantasy that doesn’t exist. He’s not Drew.”

My bottom lip trembles. “I know.”

“He’s never going to be Drew.”

I choke on a sob. “I know. And I don’t want him to be.”

Because it was Cam who dragged me from that dark abyss.

It was Cam who brought me back to life again.

She releases me in order to step up next to me, and I turn to face her.

Green eyes filled with concern search mine. “Did you sleep with him?” I don’t even have to answer her because she gives me a tight smile. “Okay, so, we’ve already gone that far. What’s the plan?”

“What do you mean?”

She sweeps an arm toward the window. “I mean, he’s here in Philadelphia, right? But he still hasn’t told his mother.”

I cringe. “No.”

“And you two are sneaking around…”

“We’re not sneaking around. We went to the art museum today.”

Her brows rise. “Really?”

“Yeah.” I release a sigh. “And ran into, I guess, an ex-friends-with-benefits of his so that was awkward.”

She cringes. “Yikes.”

That same green monster rears its head, the vision of Roxy and how casual and intimate she was with him making me have to swallow back wine-tinged bile.

But I can’t be that person.

“Look, he had a life. Just like I did.” With his brother. “A past, one he isn’t proud of. Who am I to judge him?”

“You’re his brother’s fiancée.”