Page 3 of My Sweetest Obsession
Six. Long. Agonizing. Months.
I nod, watching her struggle to process what I’m telling her.
“But—”
“I didn’t tell anyone.” I take another drink, hoping maybe this one will tip me over that line and into finally feeling nothing. “I just bided my time…and watched you.”
Her mouth falls open. “You…watched me?”
A sad smile pulls at my lips, remembering all those times I sat outside her house or the garden center, waiting to catch even a glimpse of her. “I couldn’t stay away.” I let my shoulders rise and fall. “And the day I hit a year, I called Drew…” My heart lodges in my throat, and I gulp to clear it. “I told him that I was planning to approach you, to tell you what happened, and that I was in love with you. And he flipped. This place”—I motion around us—“was where I lived before I moved back to London. I rented it out to other people while I was gone. But no one was occupying it at the time I came back, so he knew where to find me…” I take another long drink of liquid courage I’m going to need to finish telling her this story. “He came here that same night I called to confront me.”
Shaking hands clenched in her lap, Ivy watches me with tears streaming down her cheeks. “What night?”
Her voice breaks because she already knows the answer.
I can see it in the darkness creeping into her gaze.
Choking back a sob, I force myself to say the words I know will destroy her. “The night he died. One year to the day I got clean…”
Her mouth falls open on a silent gasp, and she scans the loft as if she’s going to see evidence of something. “Wh-what happened, Cam?”
“We argued.”
I take a sip of the whiskey, letting the burn of the alcohol down my throat warm my gut, when my entire body has felt ice cold since the minute I opened that box from Drew.
No amount of alcohol is going to relieve that.
Nor will the drugs sitting beside me that I’ve been fighting with myself over for the last several hours.
I knew that when I called my old dealer. I knew it when I opened the door for him and took it. I knew it when I popped open this bottle and took my first swig.
But I was so desperate not to feel that I did it anyway.
The only thing that’s kept me from sticking that needle in my vein has been how badly my hand shakes each time I try to pick it up, and my sponsor Dale’s words echoing in my head, telling me not to do it.
I rest my forearm on my knee and let the bottle dangle between them. “I told him he was an asshole for sending me what he sent me…”
Ivy’s hand flies over her mouth, and her eyes dart to the package on the floor at the G.I. Joe doll lying at her knees. His peace offering. An olive branch. “Oh, God, no…”
She knows.
She understands the ramifications of what I said to him.
How everything got so twisted.
My eyes drift to the doll, too. “Of course, I didn’t know he had sent that. I was referring to the invitation.” The one she sent. “He flew off the handle like I’ve never seen him before. We were screaming at each other, and I told him that you deserved to know the truth before you two got married.”
Her tears flow freely down her cheeks, and she struggles to swallow. “Wh-what did he say?”
The corner of my mouth quirks up, despite me fighting it. “He said I was ruining everything, but that it wouldn’t matter, because you would choose him. But he was scared. I could see it in his eyes. And I was happy he was scared because I was so pissed…about something that, turns out, wasn’t even true.”
She shoves her trembling hands through her hair, tightening her grip on it. “Oh, God…”
I finger the bottle, brushing my thumb across the lip. “I was brutal. I was ruthless. I let my anger take over, and I told him the only reason the two of you ever ended up together was because of me, and once you knew the truth, you’d call off the wedding. He told me to go to hell and left.”
“Wh-where was he going?”
His words that night still ringing in my ears as if he had just said them, I offer her a half-shrug. “I assume home to you to try to cut me off at the pass and tell you everything before I could.”
