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Chapter Seventeen
RAVEN
I spend a good half-hour in the shower, crying. I cry until my chest hurts and my eyes are swollen. Wrapping myself in a large, fluffy towel, I step out into the bedroom, where Mac is sitting on the edge of my bed with his head in his hands. He glances up, and for a second, I get a glimpse of the Mac I know. “You should pack,” I say, rummaging through my drawers to find underwear.
“I just wanted to check if you were okay.”
“Don’t forget this,” I add, handing him his t-shirt.
“Raven—” he begins, but I cut him off by glaring at him.
“Take care, Mac. It’s been fun.”
He stands, his eyes darkening. “It’s been fun,” he repeats coldly. “Fun?”
“I hope everything goes well in Nottingham.”
“Suddenly, you don’t want to come?” he asks, smirking. “The cheating and lies didn’t put you off, but the baby has?”
“Does it matter which part put me off?” I ask, grabbing a dress.
He watches as I pull on my underwear under my towel. “What I said about you being pregnant,” he starts.
“I was sick out of guilt and worry,” I cut in. “Because of the text I’d sent to Ruby. It’s nothing else.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do. I can’t have kids.”
“Raven, you don’t know that. You’re guessing because of the backstreet abortion. Nothing is impossible.”
“Jesus, Mac,” I cry, dropping my towel. “I’m not pregnant, and even if I was, I’d be heading straight for the abortion clinic. I’d hate to complicate your life any more than it already is. So, please, go and pack, start your life with Meghan or Ruby or whoever the fuck you want. But trust me, you’ll never hear from me again.”
“What changed? You just sat here begging me to stay.”
“You’ve made it clear how you feel. You don’t love me. If you did, you’d never have kept any of that from me. If you knew me at all, you’d have trusted that you could tell me all of that, and I wouldn’t have judged you. And that isn’t because I’m weak. It’s because I love the idea of love. It makes me a fool, and it makes me misjudge people, and it gets me hurt over and over, but I’ll never change because I’m a good person.”
“I wanted to tell you so many times.”
“You should have. We all have a past, and I never expected yours to be squeaky clean.”
“I’m too ashamed to talk about it,” he admits.
“And you don’t think I was ashamed sharing my past with you? You think it was easy to tell you about all those men and what happened to me as a kid?”
“No, but that’s different, Raven. You had no control over any of that. I did. What I did was my own selfish choice.”
We’re going around in circles, arguing over whose decisions are worse, and I’m done. I send a quick S.O.S. text off to Anna. It’s what all the girls use when they need rescuing, and it works because within a minute, she’s at the door. “I made plans with Anna,” I tell Mac. “You should go now.”
He glances at his watch. “At seven in the morning?”
“Yes.”
Anna nods awkwardly. “Gym.”
I button my dress and grab my gym bag from under the bed to make the lie believable. He presses his lips together, clearly wanting to out me on my lie, but instead, he nods. He grabs his t-shirt and places a gentle kiss on my head. “I’m sorry, Raven.”
“Me too,” I mutter, and he leaves, taking my heart with him.
