Page 117 of My Sweetest Agony
I wrap my arms around myself, rubbing at the goosebumps that don’t have anything to do with it being chilly because the warm, humid summer night couldn’t be more perfect. “What are you thinking about?”
It’s probably a dangerous question to ask.
One I’m not entirely sure I want the answer to, given how tense and troubled he looks.
But it’s out there now, just filling the space between us.
“Everything.”
He doesn’t really have to expand.
That one word is enough for me to understand exactly why he looks absolutely wrecked because it’s the same thing I’ve been struggling with all day. Yet somehow, knowing that we even share this torment over the situation makes it easier to want to ignore it all.
I step down onto the street, not even caring how dirty my feet are getting, so that I can be closer to him. Needing to be. And that rich scent of his leather jacket mixed with citrus and a hint of smoke floats on the breeze ruffling his hair. “Are you coming in?”
His gaze flicks up over my shoulder to the house, and he stares at it for a minute before his stormy eyes return to mine. “I can’t, Ivy.”
My stomach tenses. “Why not?”
Despite my best attempt to keep the disappointment and hurt out of my voice, the hurt still leeches into my question.
Cam reaches out with his free hand and pulls mine into his. “Because we both know what’ll happen if I come in there with you, and I can’t…” He squeezes his eyes closed and shakes his head. “That’s my brother’s house, my brother’s bed, and you are my brother’s fiancée. I’m not a good man, Ivy. I’ve made a lot of really bad mistakes in my life and done a lot of things I’m not proud of, but that…I can’t do.”
His confession makes all the little pieces of my shattered heart drive into my ribcage, the pain so deep and so real that it makes me suck in a sharp breath.
It isn’t about him not wanting me, not wanting this; it’s about his loyalty to his brother and respect for what Drew and I shared in that house, and for some reason, that only makes me want him more.
He trembles and opens his eyes, revealing the depth of pain and conflict brewing in them. When he brings the cigarette to his mouth this time, it’s with a shaking hand, and he takes a long drag from it before tossing the remaining butt onto the street and crushing it with his boot.
Smoke curls from his lips as he watches me with so much trepidation.
I take a half-step forward until my knees brush against his bike, and I can lean into him, our entwined hands pinned between us. “That’s my house, my bed, and I don’t belong to anyone anymore.”
As painful as those words are to say, actually hearing them soothes some of the guilt over what happened on that couch the other night.
At least, for me.
Cam’s gaze softens, a sadness sweeping through it like a storm blowing across the sky on a summer night. “You don’t mean that.” He uses his other hand to grip my chin and tilt it up toward him. “You still belong to Drew in your heart, and you always will. And that’s okay. That’s the way it should be. The way it was meant to be.”
A tear trickles from my eye before I can stop it, because he’s right.
Drew was my future for so long.
The only thing I wanted.
And the sole path I could see myself going on in this life was with him at my side as my partner, as my other half.
But he was ripped away from me so violently in a way I still don’t understand.
Almost as if fate had other ideas and was playing some cruel, twisted game with all of us, starting with that very first night Cam showed up and kissed me.
I press my forehead against his and draw in a long, slow breath as I try to sort through the riot of feelings thundering inside me. “You’re right. A part of me will always belong to Drew. A huge part.” I drag my head back and meet his gaze again, seeing the pain there. Feeling it. “But it doesn’t mean I don’t have room for you, too.”
“Fuck…” The word tumbles from his lips on an exhale, and he grips my chin harder, holding me there, our lips a mere hairsbreadth from each other, sharing the same air, the same oxygen. “I shouldn’t want you like this.”
Agony sears through me, making my legs tremble, and I clutch his jacket tightly, fighting the pain that wants to take over and rule in this moment. “I shouldn’t want you. It doesn’t change the fact that it’s true.”
My confession makes him shiver, and it’s the warning I get before he crashes his lips to mine in that same all-consuming way he did last night that has my entire body heating in one split second. He drags me up against him as much as he can while he still straddles his bike, my legs on either side of his thick thigh that now presses into my throbbing core.
