23. Ivy
IVY
T he 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.
It wasn’t the first time he had awoken something deep inside that blistered and seared me permanently.
Camden sees the world in black and white, and he’s acting like that’s what this convoluted situation is, too. But there are so many varying shades of gray.
Ones I see in his works.
They add depth and allow him to take something that would be flat and make it something vibrant and stunning.
Nothing is truly black and white.
Not on his canvases.
Not in our lives.
Not in this situation.
Just like there isn’t simply right and wrong.
What we shared was something in between, something far harder to define—one of those varied shades of gray.
Staring into his tumultuous blue eyes that plead with me to listen to him, to walk away and never look back, all I see are those gaps between the black and white, the spaces between right and wrong.
All I feel is the lingering memory of that night, and I shake my head. “It didn’t feel wrong.”
My voice cracks on the final word, and his entire face falls as he recoils slightly, as if I’ve slapped him rather than admitted the uncomfortable truth that weighs heavily on my soul.
What felt wrong was that it didn’t feel wrong. It felt right .
He shakes his head, his lips pressing together in a firm line. “You don’t mean that.”
“I do.” I swallow through the emotion clogging my throat, willing it to stay down so I can say what needs to be said.
“I don’t understand it, Cam. I haven’t since the moment you showed up at my house.
Even though everything tells me it’s wrong, every logical thought says you’re right and I should run…
the only times I haven’t felt like I was alone, drifting in some dark, endless sea of despair in the last two months have been when I’ve been with you. ”
He flinches, his palm cradling my face so gently yet forcefully, like it too is stuck between the two polar opposites.
“You’ve been there for me, Cam. Given me your strength.
Taken care of me when I couldn’t take care of myself.
You knew what I needed even before I did and made sure I had it, whether it was a story about Drew that brought me joy and laughter again, a great fucking sandwich, a push to finally put him to rest, or a release of everything I had let build up so staggeringly high that I was on the verge of total collapse under its weight.
So”—I shake my head, willing the tears to stop falling, though I know they won’t—“I don’t know what to do with that.
What to make of it or what it says about me now that I know the truth.
But I do know I want more of that —of what you gave me the other night, even if it is wrong in someone else’s mind because they can’t understand this thing between us. ”
Not that I do, either.
I don’t understand it at all.
Maybe I never will.
But my confession fills the air between us, mingling with the thumping bass of the music still playing. Buzzing in my ears and through my body as much as the heat from having Cam this close does.
We stand frozen as he searches my gaze, and I watch the war in his.
It seethes violently, that haunted part of him wrestling with the half that cares so deeply, the one that wants to do the right thing even if it will cause him more pain.
Cam has warned me away from him more than once, and I should have listened to that undercurrent of fear in his words. But now, it’s too late. I’m already hopelessly caught in his riptide, and I can’t get out of it, even if I wanted to. Which I’m not confident I do.
I’m not sure about anything anymore…
Except the way it feels to swim in his gaze and have his rough hands on my skin and his leather and citrus scent invading each breath.
He tightens his grip on my cheeks, tilting my face up to his, and lowers his lips until they’re just barely brushing mine.
“If we do this, Ivy, if you let me touch you, if you let me get my hands on you like that again, it will not be slow or sweet. I spent four goddamn years wanting you, fantasizing about all the ways I would take you, of how it would feel to have your lips on mine again, your hands against my skin, your nails clawing at my back, and your hot, wet cunt wrapped around my cock, so if you really want this to happen, then it will be hard and fast. I’ve reached the limits of my control when it comes to you, and one simple word from those beautiful lips of yours will send me careening over that edge. ”
His new warning, tinged with a savage energy, licks over me, coursing through my veins, heating my blood, flaming to life that part of me I thought died with Drew; the part that wants, the part that feels anything other than absolute agony every moment of every day.
And I want that part to stay lit.
I want to feel .
So, I say the only thing I can. “Yes.”
The word lives in the air between us, thickening it more and more each second that ticks past, and I wonder if he actually heard me say it.
Then, as if he’s made some decision that flicked a switch somewhere inside him, his eyes darken and his mouth crashes onto mine so quickly and so fiercely that I yelp against his lips and stagger back slightly.
But one of his strong arms wraps around me, pulling me up against him fully, and his hard cock strains between us, pressing deep into my belly as he devours my mouth, kissing and licking, probing and taking, like he can’t get enough of it.
It isn’t sweet.
It’s borderline feral.
An animalistic tinge to his movements that tells me he’s hovering on the edge of completely letting go of everything that restrains him.
And I want him to let go.
I want the recklessness I see in his eyes.
Crave all that passion and energy focused solely on me and this.
My core aches, the dull throb pulsing there relentlessly as my need for the man who kisses me so fiercely envelops my entire being.
All thoughts of everything else, including all the reasons this is so bad, all the ways it’s wrong, and all the secrets and lies that led to it, melt away in a single instant.
I wrap my arms around his neck, tunneling my fingers through his thick hair, and he groans, angling my face slightly so he can get a different position, utterly consuming me with everything he has and trying to take all that I am from me.
The bed on the other side of the studio seems so goddamn far away all of a sudden, and he seems to have the same thought because instead of backing me up that direction, he turns and forces me to retreat three steps until my shoes bump up against the edge of the canvas he was just painting on.
I jerk and look down at it—the few strokes of black paint he swiped across it before I interrupted—then up at him. “What are you doing?”
Hand pressed into my lower back, keeping me pinned to his warm, hard body, Cam ignores my question and kisses my neck. I crane it to the side, giving him better access to work his way down, his lips raising goosebumps everywhere they touch as his fingers trail along the waistband of my jeans.
“You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, Ivy. That’s why I’ve painted you too many times to even count.” His words vibrate against my skin where his lips are pressed to it. “But now that I have you here like this, I get to really paint you .”
What?
Paint…
Me?
It takes me a second to figure out what he’s saying, my brain trying to process the words while it short-circuits under his touch, but when his hand slips into my pants and cups me between my legs, I jolt against him, my nails digging into the back of his neck.