Page 106 of My Sweetest Obsession
Her eyes narrow, unease filling her gaze. “Cam, you’re scaring me…”
I hate those words.
The last time she said them, I blew up her entire world.
Even though so much time has passed since that night, the ripple effects of it still linger.
That agony sometimes return when we least expect it.
But somehow, we’ve found a way to keep swimming against the tide of anguish.
We’ve kept our heads above water and grown stronger by taking things a second, a minute, an hour, a day at a time.
And this is part of that process.
Something that’s been a long time coming.
“Go in.”
She cautiously steps around me, leaving the stroller near the entrance, and enters the gallery through the black drapes with me right behind.
Her steps falter.
Her mouth drops open.
Her eyes lock on the massive canvas hanging in the center of the space.
“Oh, my God, is that…”
I step up beside her, my gaze raking over the image I’ve spent hours staring at and have memorized. “Yes.”
She makes a little strangled noise in the back of her throat, and I glance over at her, but she’s fixated on the canvas where I first made love to her, the night she came to my studio and learned the truth about what happened at Mom’s birthday party.
I dip my head low so I can brush my lips against her ear. “I call it ‘Worshiping Ivy,’ and it was too beautiful not to share with the world.”
“Cam…”
I can’t tell by the way she says my name, if she’s angry or not, and she doesn’t even look at me, so transfixed by it that she stands completely still.
Several minutes tick by as she examines every inch of the canvas—the smears, the blotches, the handprints in the paint that tell the story of our first time together.
The longer I wait for her to say something, the harder my body trembles.
My grip on a still sleeping Drea is that only thing that keeps me grounded enough to wait Ivy out and give her the time and space to gather her thoughts.
When she finally turns toward me, her eyes are wet, barely restraining tears. But before she can say anything, her gaze finds something over my shoulder and she pushes past me to approach it.
I hold my breath as she studies the paintings lining the wall.
Each and every one of her.
Some that she’s seen before, others that I’ve done in the studio when I went over to work and tucked away so that she wouldn’t get a glimpse of them when she came over to see what I’ve been painting over the last several months.
She walks slowly, examining each canvas, and pauses in front of the one I did of her on the bed our first night together, and I know she sees the change I made.
“I figured since many of these were intimate, you wouldn’t want your face to be shown, so I modified them slightly, but the originals are still at the studio.”
In any where her identity might have been revealed, I’ve changed it to a partial profile or cropped the painting completely so no one will ever know that it’s her unless she wants them to.
