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"Hey," I said, voice low. "It's not too late."
"Not too late for what?" she asked, voice a whisper.
"To start over. To have a different life. That life you would have had if things had been different."
"I can't," she objected.
"Why not?"
"Because I'm not the same person. Because I can't have those same things. Because," she broke off, voice cracking.
"Because why?"
Her head hung as she took a deep breath. "Because how could I ever act like all this didn't happen? How could I go about a normal life as though I haven't been blown up and whipped and shot and chased across all the continents, that I didn't dedicate my life to a fool's mission? How could I ever find people who could accept my past? That would embrace what I have become?"
"What have you become, Mack?" I asked, sensing something there, some poison that needed purging once and for all.
There was a long pause, long enough for me to think she wasn't going to answer. When she finally did, it was in such a small voice that I had to lean my head down to hear the beginning of it. "Unlovable," she started in a squeak before going on. "Cold and prickly and... hard. No one loves a hard place, Roan. They avoid them, try never to end up there. And that's what I am. A hard place."
My eyes closed for a long moment, not sure exactly how to approach this. Fifteen years ago, I would have known. But that was then. This was now. Things had changed. She had changed. But not nearly as much as she seemed to think, worried about. "If you were really hard, Mack, you would have taken any of those ample opportunities you had to put a plug between my eyes. That is what hard people do. But people who are covering their hurt with hard? They hesitate. They talk themselves out of it. You're not hard. You've been through some shit. You learned to wear a shield. But you choose to pick that up. You can just as easily put it back down."
"It's not that easy."
"Nothing is ever easy. But the question isn't if it is easy, it's if it is worth it. If the answer is 'yes,' then you work at it until you get there."
"I've killed people."
"I have too."
"I've let people down, not protected them when I should have, could have."
"Sweetheart, you are preaching to the fucking choir here. And you know what?"
"What?"
"I found people," I told her. "I found people who see all the shit I have been through, all the ugly I have brought into the world, and they accept it. They embrace me anyway. They let me into their lives. They love me. I think the only person who thinks you are unlovable is you."
"Yeah, well, I know me better than anyone else. So I would know."
Stubborn.
She had grown stubborn.
Normally, it was a trait I liked. I enjoyed fight. I appreciated people who were strong in their convictions. Who refused to waver.
Right now, though, I knew that trying to out-stubborn her was simply not going to work.
My arm around her upper chest released her, my hand sliding across to the collar of her shirt, fingers slipping inside to snag the chain, dragging it out, holding the clock face up.
"You still wear this."
"I was wearing it the night of the explosion," she told me, chin tucking to be able to look down at it. "It stopped working from the impact. The hand got crushed," she explained as we both looked at it.
"Then why did you keep it on?"
"As a reminder," she told me, her voice tight. "Why I was doing what I was doing. Because, at the time, I thought you had tried to kill me at the exact moment it stopped."
"Yeah?" I asked, running the pad of my thumb over the face. "That's the only reason?" She was tensing up. We were getting there. "You don't think that maybe you couldn't take it off because you felt the same way about it as I did about your picture?"
"Guilt?" she asked, trying for prickly since her shields were failing her.
"Love, Mack," I corrected, feeling her body jolt at the word.
"It can't be love."
"Why not?"
"Because you're not Mikhail Osman."
"Every story I told you was true, Mack. I gave you more than I ever gave anyone else."
She had nothing there.
It wasn't a lie.
"And because I am not Mackenzie Minasian anymore."
"Yes, you are."
"You don't know me anymore, Roan."
"I know everything now, Mack. You just told me."
"I'm not the starry-eyed virgin who looked at you like you hung the moon."
"You're still her," I corrected, releasing her stomach, sinking my hand into her hip to turn her to face me. "You're just more now. In case no one has ever told you, more is always better," I told her, lips curving up a bit.
