Chapter 28 Cam
CAM
Ivy stares up at me with so much affection in her soft gaze that it feels like I might drown under the weight of it.
I’m not sure I’m ever going to believe I deserve it.
No matter how long this lasts, no matter how long she puts up with me and all the bullshit I carry with me, the fact that a woman like Ivy, who has suffered so much because of my actions, can still look at me like this feels like a dream I’ll be ripped away from at any moment.
I’ve lived with nightmares for so many years. The kind that had me wake screaming, drenched in sweat, my body craving all those horrible things I gave it. They became what I expected, and after Drew died and I learned the truth of what I had done, they only got worse.
Darker.
More demanding.
But this offer in her gaze is all warmth and light.
She pushes up onto her toes and skimming her lips across mine, running her fingers through my hair. “I know you will.”
Just feeling her hands on me again is enough to make my cock harden where it’s pinned between her belly and mine.
I’ve missed this touch.
The one filled with affection and compassion instead of anger and hate.
It makes heat ripple across every inch of my skin and warms me in a way nothing else can.
When she pulls back, a tear trickles down her cheek.
I dip my head and kiss it away, the saltiness splashing against my lips, and all I want is to be here to kiss away every single tear she ever sheds.
“I love you, Ivy, and I can’t promise things will ever be perfect, that I ever will be, because I’m far from it.
But I promise I will do anything and everything for you and this baby until the day that I die. Anything you ask, anything you need.”
“What about what you need?”
Her question makes my heart skip a beat, because it’s been so long since I’ve asked myself that or even considered it.
But it’s an easy one to answer.
I take her face between my palms, cradling her soft cheeks. “You and this baby are all that I need. To know that you’re safe and happy, and you might not be right now, but we’ll get there. I know we can.”
That is my hope.
That one day, all this pain won’t cripple us. Open wounds will close. Scabs will heal. Scars will form. And they will still ache, probably forever. But they won’t destroy us the way they do now.
I won’t let them.
She nods, leaning into my touch. “We can.”
And then her mouth is on mine again.
I kiss her fiercely, in the way I’ve so badly wanted to over the last several months but haven’t been able to because I couldn’t tell her I loved her. I couldn’t show her I did. That wasn’t what she needed or wanted in any of those moments.
She wanted the feeling—the physical one, not all the emotional baggage we both carry with us, not reminders of all the reasons what we were doing should never have happened.
But now all of that has changed because we’ve changed.
Because we’ve finally been able to move past that point where the agony and guilt were at their highest point, when it felt like there was no way around them and no way to ever come back from it.
Yet somehow, we made it over that sharp peak.
We passed that breaking point, cutting ourselves deeply on the shards of the lives we had before, but we came out alive.
We’re on our way back down the other side.
Hopefully a little wiser and a little more ready to deal with all the things we’re going to have to face. The hard questions that we’ll both have to continue to ask ourselves, maybe for the rest of our lives, about why things turned out like this.
But we’ll do it together.
Because we’re stronger like this—tethered together by the twisted, intersecting strands of fate woven by some unknown hands rather than getting trapped by their binds as we fight against them.
Ivy gives herself over completely to the kiss, a little mewl coming from the back of her throat. I groan in response, knowing full well what that sound means, what she wants, and it’s exactly what I need, too.
Only, I want it to be different from the way it has been between us this entire time.
Even those first few nights we had together before the shit hit the fan, I was still holding back, continuing to hide things from her—about my past, about myself, about what I had done—but now that she knows everything, I can truly let her see all of me and what I really feel about her and this baby.
How much I love them and need them in my life.
She pulls away abruptly and takes my hand in hers, tugging on it to lead me down the hallway toward the bedroom that I’ve walked out of so many nights feeling like absolute shit because of what I had done for her, because of what it was doing to me.
It broke me down the more I came to make her feel good.
But now, she actually wants me there in that bed with her.
She wants to be in my arms. It’s no longer just a way to forget, but a way to make promises about the future, a way to cement how we feel about each other and where all this is going, what it all means.
It may be too early to really know that or even attempt to unravel the depth of those feelings that live inside us, but we can sort through them together as long as we try.
And I will never stop trying.
Ivy stops at the edge of the bed and releases my hand, reaching for the hem of her sweater, but I catch her wrist, shaking my head.
“No.” I brush my lips across her cheek to her ear. “Let me do it. I want to see all of you like this.”
With the lights on.
Without the dark cloud hanging over me thinking she hated me.
All I want to do is drink her in.
Because Christ, she’s beautiful pregnant, even more so than she was before, which I didn’t think was even possible.
The way her entire body seems to glow, her breasts higher and fuller, the swell of her belly and knowing she’s growing a life in there. I run my hand across it, pressing my palm over the center, and the baby kicks, a tiny foot pressing into my touch.
I grin at her and another tear slides down her cheek.
Her lips curl. “I think she likes your voice.”
A blazing warmth floods my chest, and somehow, it feels like my heart stops and beats faster at the same time.
I didn’t know how badly I needed to hear that, to know that my niece feels something for me even before she’s entered this world. That I am going to have a chance to watch her grow and thrive and become everything that Drew would want her to be.
Tears prick my eyes, but I blink them away and manage to swallow through the tightness in my throat. “I hope so because she’s going to be hearing a lot of it.”
Because I plan to spend every waking moment I can with this woman and this baby.
Being whatever they need.
Giving them the world.
Ensuring they have anything they could ever want.
Ivy laughs at my comment, and it’s filled with something I wasn’t sure I would ever hear from her again—joy, maybe hope for the future, and faith that in the end, it won’t just be agony and anger but love and hope that pulls us through the hard days.
Today started out as one of them.
When I walked into that meeting, I was nearing my breaking point with Ivy.
After weeks of keeping it all in, giving her what she needed while I tried to ignore how badly it was affecting me, and then showing her the nursery, pretending it wasn’t pure torture to walk away that night was getting to be impossible.
But I don’t have to pretend anymore.
I don’t have to hold back.
And I won’t.
Not ever again with her.
I grab the hem of her sweater and slowly glide it up over her stomach, her breasts, and pull it free, letting it fall to the floor. Her long, dark hair spills out, and I grasp a strand of it, letting the silky texture skate over my skin.
My hands itch to touch every single inch of her, but I force myself to hold back, to instead allow only my gaze to rake over her. From her warm, welcoming gaze, to her slightly parted lips swollen from our kissing, and down over the swell of her breasts peeking out of her bra.
I trail my fingertips along the edge of the material, and she shivers, inching closer until her belly presses into mine again.
Resting her hands on my chest, she leans in. “You know what I just realized?”
Her voice wavers, but the unsteadiness has nothing to do with fear or trepidation and everything to do with the fact that she’s just as on edge as I am.
“What?”
“I’ve never gotten to really see you naked.” I narrow my eyes on her and she smirks, sliding a hand down to tease them along the hem of my T-shirt, making my skin pebble with goosebumps. “You were always so focused on me, so intent that you never gave me a chance to explore you.”
I grin at her. “Well, now you have it.” Dipping my head, I drag my lips over her temple. “All the time in the fucking world…”
She pulls at the material, and I take a step back, reaching behind me to tug it off in one smooth motion. I toss it onto the floor and stand in front of her, suddenly feeling exposed in a way I never have before.
Her warm eyes move over me, across my chest to my NA medallion hanging from my neck. She reaches out and grabs it, running her fingers across it. “How come I’ve never seen this before?”
My old, familiar friend guilt tries to push its way into my head, but I fight to force it back. “I take it off while I paint so it doesn’t get anything on it.”
“What about when you’re not painting?”
She’s referring to the many times we’ve been together here, when she’s asked me to come over, when she’s needed me…
“I took it off when I came over here because it always felt like I was picking back up, like I was doing something wrong and giving into something that I knew was hurting me.”
Her gaze softens, an apology soaked in the wetness brimming around them. “I’m sorry I made you feel that way…”
“Don’t.” I press my thumb across her lips, silencing her. “Don’t apologize for something I freely gave you. I wanted to be here, Ivy. I knew what I was doing. Don’t feel guilty about anything that’s happened between us.”
It takes a few moments before she nods and returns her focus to examining me, her gaze drifting down my torso, and she dips her head to the side and grabs my hand, lifting it to examine the twining black and white snakes that swirl up my left arm. “What do these mean?”
My body starts to tremble as she examines them more closely, taking in every minute detail of the artwork I’ve worn on my skin for over a decade.
I swallow thickly, and her eyes flick up to meet mine in question.
“They’re how I always saw Drew and me. I got this shortly after we graduated high school.
When he went off to college, so sure of himself and his path to medical school, and I kind of…
”—I shrug—“I knew I wanted to do the art thing, but I didn’t have much direction. ”
Her brow furrows. “But you went to art school?”
“Eventually.” I nod. “It didn’t happen right away, though.”
She trails a finger over the dark snake, and then over the light one. “Which one is you?”
I can’t help the little laugh that slips from my lips. “Do you really have to ask that?”
Her gaze immediately flicks up to mine. “Of course I do.”
The sincerity in her words makes it hard to say what should be so obvious. “I think we both know that Drew was the light in this world, and I was the shadow.”
She shakes her head as tears well in her eyes. “That’s not true. You brought light back into my world when it was at its darkest.”
“Then I snuffed it out again…”
Ivy presses her lips together firmly like she’s trying to fight back a sob.
“That light was still there. It was just hidden by all the guilt and anger and pain.” She reaches up and takes my face in her small, soft palm.
“I don’t want you to ever see yourself as only one thing, Cam.
Just like your paintings, you’re not all black and white.
There are a thousand different shades of gray in them, and there are in you, too. And in me, and in everyone else.”
A tear slips from my eye, and she quickly swipes it away and kisses me softly before she moves her hand down to the small tattoo on my rib cage to examine it.
She pulls back with a raised brow. “That definitely isn’t what I was expecting…”
I smirk at her.
The two broken hearts with the word “crybaby” written across them have sat there for almost as long as the snakes have wound on my arm.
Her gaze flicks up from it. “You definitely need to explain this one to me.”
My lips twitch as I try to contain a smile at the flood of memories that come with that ink. “That’s what Drew used to call me.”
Wide, horrified eyes meet mine. “What?”
I chuckle. “Not in a hurtful way. I mean, it was at the beginning, but we were very young. I was always really emotional as a child, and I used to cry all the time.”
“And then things kind of switched when your dad died.”
I narrow my gaze on her. “Yeah, but how did you—”
“Your mom told me…”
Of course she did.
The relationship Mom and Ivy share is special, something I’m so happy they both have after Drew’s death, but sometimes, there are things that are better left unsaid. And I never know what kind of secrets—embarrassing or otherwise—Mom might spill to her.
Though, this one doesn’t sting as much as some of the others because I want Ivy to know this part of me, to help her understand why I am the way I am and why I turned to alcohol and drugs to cope with all those feelings I couldn’t deal with after what I did in Mom’s garden.
“I kind of shut down emotionally when we lost him, kept it all in, and Drew became the one who was much more open with his feelings. So, I started throwing the insult back at him, and it kind of became, I don’t know, a joke between us.”
Her lips curl into a soft smile, and she coasts her fingers across it, making me shudder and my cock ache at the gentle touch. “Are these the only tattoos you have?”
I shake my head, unease creeping across the back of my neck. “No, I have a newer one.”
“You do?”
Trepidation tightens my skin until it feels like it might rupture because I don’t know how Ivy will take this one.
But there isn’t any way to hide it from her, nor do I want to.
No more hiding.
I slowly turn and let her see my other ribcage and the ink I got there after the night she saved my life.
When she became even more to me than I thought possible…
Ivy sucks in a sharp breath. “Is that…”
I nod. “A peony. Whenever I see them, I think of you.”
The tears that had pooled in her eyes earlier fall now, and she nods. “They’re my favorite.”
“I know.” I slide my fingers under her chin and tilt her face up toward me.
“And I knew that no matter what happened between us, even if you eventually told me to get the fuck out of your life for good, that I would never be able to fully walk away, that I would always want part of you with me. You saved me, Ivy, and now, I’ll have you with me forever, no matter what, as a reminder of what you did for me that night. ”