Page 85 of My Sweetest Agony

My head spins wildly, trying to make sense of any of this, and I release the counter and stagger over to the painting of me from that night.

If I had never seen this, if I had never questioned him about it, would Cam have ever told me the truth? Or would I have gone on thinking that one of the best nights of my life was with Drew?

Other canvases stand stacked, leaning against the wall behind it, and I reach out with a trembling hand and pull it back, exposing the next one.

Of me—sleeping on the couch in my living room.

I move to the next.

Of me—holding my mother’s lily.

The next…

Of me—tears streaming down my face as I stare up with utter devastation in my eyes that he somehow managed to capture perfectly.

Each one a snapshot of time we’ve spent together.

They’re all of me…

I frantically move another stack, tugging back a landscape propped at the front to find half a dozen more of me—each depicting a single moment from over the past several weeks.

Each drenched in my pain, reflecting precisely what I was feeling as if he weren’t merely witnessing it but actually experiencing it right along with me, each and every time.

These are my life.

These are my anguish.

These are his.

Cam moves, his footsteps making the old floorboards creak, but the look I cut his way over my shoulder makes him freeze, hand tightening around the still-dripping brush in it.

“You are my muse. You have been since the first moment I saw you…” His Adam’s apple bobs on his forced swallow, like he’s fighting through something lodged there. “And I haven’t been able to paint anything else since the night I came to your house…”

My hands tremble as I let the canvases fall back into place with a thunk that draws a cringe from him.

But I can’t care about that.

Not when the reality of what happened keeps smacking me squarely in the face. “Drew knew…”

Cam nods.

“But you never went in…”

“No.” He shakes his head. “I left because I had just kissed my brother’s girlfriend and gotten her off”—his voice rumbles, heavy with the same kind of agony tearing me apart right now—“and I wanted to do it again. I wanted to do worse.”

And I wanted him to.

I practically wept when he walked away, desperate to keep him there, my body aching to free his cock and allow him to slide home.

“You must have said something to him when you went back to the party, something that tipped him off, because Drew texted me shortly after I left, and it only said five words. ‘I know what you did.’”

He KNEW.

Because I walked into that house on shaky legs, found him, and told him I couldn’t wait to get home to finish what we started in the garden.

He. Fucking. Knew.

I choke on another sob, my hands fisting at my sides, seeking anything to cling to that might stop this spiraling feeling. Nails bite into my skin, but I don’t care. I need the physical pain to cut through the agony threatening to shred me apart right now. “That night changed everything…”