Page 89 of My Sweetest Agony

Joy.

Strength.

Even when he was suffering just as badly.

That first night brought color back into his life.

And kissing him last week seemed to bring a spark back to mine.

For the first time in months, I felt alive, if only for a few moments. Even though it was wrong, even though I knew it was, it was somehow the only thing that felt right in a long time. That release was more than just sexual. It was an unleashing of everything that had kept me prone and stagnant. It was what I needed.

I don’t know what to do with him.

I don’t know what to do with myself.

I don’t know what to do with this.

All I know is that walking away and heeding his warning when he did that for me isn’t an option.

23

IVY

The mere thought of never seeing him again brutally rips the air from my lungs. Dread coils around my spine like a poisonous serpent and tightens. My knees threaten to buckle again.

And still, I don’t understand it.

I have every reason to hate him for what he did—to Drew and to me.

Rationally, there is no other choice but to walk away and never look back. To flee with what’s left of my heart, even if it is only scattered, fragile pieces that threaten to crush into nothing but dust under the weight of truths now bombarding me.

The longer I stare at him, the worse it all gets until my ribs feel like they’re going to snap as I attempt to process everything he just told me and make sense of the riot of feelings warring inside me.

All this time…I had it wrong…

“It. Was. You.”

I just keep coming back to that fact. Reliving that moment in time when my eyes met his across the yard. When I called him over to me on that bench with that simple question. When he sat down beside me. When his hand came up to my chin. When his lips met mine. When he stole my fucking soul. All on the same night that I gave myself to Drew.

Tears blur my vision, red hot with anger, disbelief, and a kind of soul-crushing confusion I’ve never felt before.

Cam softly brushes them away with trembling hands as soon as they hit my cheeks. “You should go, and don’t come back, Ivy. I never should have…” He stops and swallows thickly, glancing away as his clenched jaw tics. “I would love to blame what I did on being high or drunk or some other way out of my right mind, but I wasn’t that night. And I never should have touched you. Never should have allowed myself…that. And I won’t do it again.”

An unexplainable panic seizes me. “W-why not?”

The question slips out before I can stop it, before I can contemplate why I’m asking, why it matters when he’s right.

His eyes widen slightly, confusion furrowing his brow. “Because it’s wrong, Ivy. I’m not a good person, and every fucking thing I’ve done from that moment on has been wrong?—”

Wrong.

Wrong.

Wrong.

One word that has come into my head so many times since that night we spread Drew’s ashes, since Cam’s touch lit me aflame and I wondered what the hell I was thinking, since I finally felt something again other than utter despair.

Only it wasn’t the first time he had done that to me.