Good Girl Complex(Avalon Bay #1)(101)

“You humiliated me,” she spits out through tears and rage. I want to throw my arms around her and take her pain away, but I’m the one doing this to her, and every second she levels me with that look of devastation rips me apart. “You made me look like an idiot.”

“Please, Mac. I’ll do anything.” I grab her hands, squeezing when she tries to turn away. Because I know the second she takes that first step, she’s gonna keep walking forever. “I love you. Let me prove it. Give me a chance.”

“You had a chance.” Tears stream down her cheeks. “You could have told me the truth months ago. You had a million opportunities, including the day I asked you point-blank if you knew Preston, if he got you fired. But you didn’t tell me the truth. Instead you let everyone laugh at me behind my back.” Mac pulls her hands from mine to wipe her eyes. “I might have been able to forgive you for everything else if you hadn’t lied right to my face. Got to hand it to you, Cooper. You did it so well. And then you got everyone I thought was my friend to lie too. Put me in this perfect little glass house of bullshit for your own amusement.”

“Mackenzie.” I’m grasping at a rope as it’s sliding through my fingers. With every breath I take, she’s slipping further away. “Let me fix it.”

“There’s nothing left to fix.” Her expression flattens to an eerie dullness. “I’m going into the house and I’m packing up my stuff and I’m leaving. Because that’s the only thing left for me to do. Don’t try to stop me.”

Then she turns her back and disappears beyond the glow of the fire.

There’s silence in her wake.

“Forget what she said,” Evan blurts out, shoving my shoulder. “Go after her.”

I stare out at nothingness. “She doesn’t want me to.”

I know Mac well enough to see when she’s made up her mind. Anything I do now will only chase her off faster, hardening the hatred. Because she’s right. I was a shit person when I met her.

Nothing I’ve done since has proven different.

“Then I’ll go,” Evan growls, throwing off my attempt to stop him.

Whatever. He won’t succeed in changing her mind. She’s leaving.

She’s gone.

Everyone else slowly wanders away until I’m left alone on the beach. I sink down to the sand. I sit there for I don’t know how long—so long the bonfire is reduced to cold embers. Evan doesn’t return. No point telling me what I already know. The sun peeks above the waves by the time I trudge back to the house through the remnants of the aborted party.

Daisy doesn’t come running to be let out when I walk inside. Her water bowl isn’t in the kitchen.

Half the closet is empty in my room.

I throw myself on the bed and stare up at the ceiling. I feel numb. Empty.

I wish I’d known then how hard it would be now to miss Mackenzie Cabot.





CHAPTER FORTY-TWO


MACKENZIE

I lived my whole life without Cooper Hartley. Then, six months together and I’ve forgotten what it was not to know him. Six months, and only minutes to shred it to hell.

One overheard conversation.

A single devastating admission.

Quick as blowing out a match, my heart went numb.

After leaving Cooper’s house in a despondent haze, I sat in the back of a cab with Daisy and paid the guy to drive through town for nearly two hours. At some point, the cab dropped me off at Tally Hall. I showed up at Bonnie’s door with my bag in one hand and Daisy’s leash in the other, and with a sympathetic pout, she welcomed us home. Lucky for me, her new roommate sleeps out most nights. Less lucky, the moment people started getting up for class and trudging through the halls in the morning, Daisy began barking at the unfamiliar foot traffic. In an instant, the resident advisor was on us, demanding that we vacate.

For Bonnie’s sake, I told him we’d only popped in for a few minutes to say hello, though I’m not sure he bought it. By the afternoon, Daisy and I were in the backseat of another cab, searching for a plan B. Turns out there isn’t a hotel in the Bay that allows pets. Something about a dog show years back that went horribly awry.

So that’s how I find myself at Steph and Alana’s house. Daisy, the little traitor, hops right onto the couch and into Steph’s lap. I’m a bit more reluctant as I sit down next to Steph, while Alana pleads their case. They’d sent a dozen or so text messages after I’d stormed out of the party. It wasn’t so much the content but the persistence that convinced me of their sincerity.

“In our defense,” Alana says, standing with her arms crossed, “we didn’t know you’d end up being cool.”

I have to hand it to her, she’s unapologetically herself. Even in admitting that she had no small part in crafting the revenge plot, she doesn’t have it in her to mince words.

“For real, though,” she continues. “By the time Cooper told us you two were really a thing, it seemed meaner to tell you the truth.”

“No,” I say simply. “It was meaner to lie.”

Because while the truth hurts you, the lie degrades you. When I realized Preston had slept around on me, I understood what it was to be That Girl. For years, our friends had smiled in my face, knowing all along I was his patsy, while I remained oblivious to his “extracurriculars”—his parade of Marilyns. It never occurred to me that Cooper would turn around and lie to me as well. Or that, yet again, the people I called friends would play accomplices to my ignorance. Some lessons we have to learn twice.