Page 58 of My Sweetest Agony

Cam shifts beside me and settles his hand on my back, rubbing gently. “I’m sorry, Ivy.” His voice sounds gravelly, as if he is struggling the same way I am, just doing a much better job at hiding it. “I honestly don’t know if it ever will get better, but what we did tonight…”

I lift my head and meet his gaze. His blue eyes swim with concern and a dozen other emotions I can’t distinguish.

“It had to be done. For you and for him.”

For you and for him…

Those words batter against my skull, and I know he’s right. Deep down in my gut. But my heart doesn’t seem to want to agree.

The memory of watching the ashes float away in the wind and disappear into that dark water clutches my chest so tightly I struggle to drag in air. “I just don’t…” I fumble with my words, unsure how to explain the suffocating sense of uncertainty and loss overwhelming me. “I don’t know what to do without him.”

No answer has come in the weeks since he died.

And it feels like one will never come.

Hiccupped sobs overwhelm me, stealing my ability to speak any further. And there isn’t anything left to say, anyway.

This agony won’t ever dissipate.

This loneliness and hollowness are my new normal.

This is my new life, even though it doesn’t feel like living at all.

Cam slides his hand from my back to around my shoulders and reaches over to drag me up onto his lap, wrapping his arms around me and allowing me to bury my face against his neck.

He holds me to him tightly.

Keeps me from shattering.

Offers me his strong body to give me something to cling to when it feels like I’m free-falling.

Leather and citrus fill my labored breaths, each one so painful that I want them to stop.

I want all of this to just stop.

Cam’s warm breath flutters over me as he presses his lips into my hair, his arms securely gripping my trembling body. “You keep doing what you have been doing, Ivy. Making it through each second, each minute, each hour, each day. That’s all you can do.”

His voice doesn’t waver.

His hold doesn’t yield.

His confidence in his words as steady as the man who said them.

I pull my head back and look at him in the moonlight streaming in through the front window. His hooded eyes hold so much pain, and yet somehow, they ground me because they also possess an profound certainty that I wish I could share. “You say that like it’s so easy.”

Cam shakes his head, brushing hair away from my face and swiping away my tears with his thumb. “It’s far from easy, but it’s all you can do. It’s all I can do.”

He isn’t just talking about losing Drew…

It’s how he lives his life now in recovery.

Day in and day out, he has to face the agonizing pull of his addiction.

And now he’s lost Drew.

It’s precisely the kind of thing that could drag him back into that dark place he fought hard to get out of.

He truly does understand it.