Page 19 of My Sweetest Obsession
I block it out, setting my phone back on the counter and turning to face the blank canvas again.
The music continues to play, helping drown out those voices I’m trying so hard to silence tonight, but it won’t be enough. So much tension has built through my body that every muscle aches and trembles, and knowing Ivy is suffering only makes it worse.
Instead of grabbing the paintbrush, I snag the box cutter from the counter—the very one I used to open the package from Drew.
I tighten my hand around it, my gaze traveling over the hundreds of paintings in the studio. Piles and piles of them lean against the walls. Almost all of them of Ivy.
But I can’t touch them with this blade.
I can’t destroy what I have left of Ivy, even if I have destroyed her.
My hand flexes around it, though, urged to shred something, to make anything look how I feel on the inside—flayed alive.
The stereo moves to the next song, and the change in beat propels me forward, those familiar vibrations through the floor comforting as I approach my target.
It’s the painting that made me a household name—the one everyone recognizes.
They may not know my street art, those murals painted on the sides of buildings in unsuspecting neighborhoods. But they know this.
The little girl smiles back at me, holding her balloon so tightly, the simple joy of receiving it enough to brighten her face and the world around her.
I don’t know why this image came to me that day.
I don’t understand how it was so crystal clear.
But I had to paint it, give it to the world, make a statement about those joys in life we take for granted as we grow up and allow outside forces to crush us.
Now, she seems to mock me.
Because there is no joy left in my life.
I bring the box cutter blade to the canvas and slash it across, ripping through the image and tearing myself open in the process.
Tears stream down my face, but I keep cutting, obliterating it until nothing remains but pieces dangling from the wood and scattered across the floor.
My chest heaves with a sob, and I turn away from it, my vision immediately zeroing in on the blank canvas that has haunted me all night.
I turn the blade on it next.
Slicing.
Stripping the canvas away until nothing remains.
There was nothing there anyway.
There might not ever be again.
My muse is gone, along with any hope of ever finding her.
6
IVY
Man has invented so many brutal ways to torture someone.
Vicious machines and implements that inflict the worst types of pain imaginable.
Each one with the goal of breaking the victim—physically and mentally.
