Good Girl Complex(Avalon Bay #1)(76)

“See, that sounds dumb as hell.” I shake my head, because I truly don’t get it. Rich people buying status symbols to impress other rich people who bought the same status symbols to impress them. A vicious cycle of waste and pretension. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars to a university just for looks? Fuck that noise.”

“I didn’t even want to go to Garnet—it was the only way they’d support my gap year so I could have the time to build my apps and expand the business. But since I got here, all I’ve been thinking about is tackling a new challenge, finding a new business venture that excites me as much as my websites did when I was first launching them.”

“Well, you know what I think? Do you, and to hell what everyone else thinks.”

“Easier said than done,” she says with that familiar tone of trepidation.

Daisy brings us a small hermit crab hiding in its shell, which Mac takes and sets back in the sand before finding another stick to throw instead.

“Yeah, so what?” Where she’s concerned, her parents have always been a daunting obstacle to realizing what she really wants out of life. For someone with every advantage, that’s bullshit. She’s stronger than that. “If you want it bad enough, fight for it. Take the bruises. What’s the worst they can do, cut you off? If you’re honest with them about how much this all means to you and they still don’t support your dreams, how much are you really going to miss them?”

She lets out a soft sigh. “Honestly, sometimes I wonder if they love me at all. Most of the time, I’m a prop or a piece on a board in their larger game of strategy. I’m plastic to them.”

“I could bore the hell out of you with crappy family stories,” I tell her. “So I get that. It’s not the same, but trust me, I get feeling alone and unloved. Always trying to fill that void with something, anything else. I can almost forgive my dad for being a mean bastard, you know? He had an addiction. It turned everything he touched to shit. Eventually killed him. I wasn’t even that sad about it, except then all we had left was our mom. For a while, anyway, but then she split too. The two of them couldn’t get away from us fast enough.” My throat closes up. “I’ve spent so much time scared that I’ll turn into one of them. Afraid no matter what I do, I’m fighting against the current and I’ll end up dead or a deadbeat.”

Fuck.

I’ve never said those words out loud before.

It’s terrifying how much Mac brings out of me. How much I want her to know me. It’s terrifying how I don’t feel in control of my heart that’s racing to catch her. To keep her. Worried that at any moment she might come to her senses and ditch my ass.

“Hey.” Then she takes my hand, and all I can think is that I’d stand in traffic for this girl. “Let’s make a pact: We won’t let each other become our parents. The buddy system never fails.”

“Deal.” It’s so corny I half manage a laugh. “Seriously, though. Don’t waste this moment. If your heart’s telling you to follow something—go for it. Don’t let anyone hold you back, because life is too damn short. Build your empire. Slay dragons.”

“You should put that on a T-shirt.”

Daisy comes back, curling around Mac’s feet. Guess she finally ran herself ragged. I put her on the leash as Mac and I sit in the sand. A comfortable silence falls between us. I don’t understand how she manages to instill equal parts chaos and peace inside me. When we’re arguing, sometimes I want to throttle her. She drives me mad. She does crazy shit like climbing metal ladders during lightning storms. And then suddenly we have moments like this, where we’re sitting side by side, quiet, lost in our own thoughts yet completely in tune. Connected. I don’t know what it means. Why we can yell at each other one second, and be totally at peace the next. Maybe it just means we’re both nuts.

Or maybe it means I’m falling for her.





CHAPTER THIRTY


MACKENZIE

A few days after my hotel inspection, I meet up with Steph and Alana at a sandwich shop in town. Seems strange that a couple of weeks ago we were barely on speaking terms, and now we chat almost every day. It started when Steph looped me into a group text with Alana to share some pictures of Evan on their roof fixing the hole from the storm. His jeans had ridden down, revealing half his ass, and she’d captioned the pics with: Someone’s doing a half-ass job. Then Alana shared a funny screenshot from BoyfriendFails, and—although I was worried it might sound like a brag or serve as another glaring allusion to the topic of money—I confessed to the girls that I’m the one who created those sites. Luckily, it only made them like me more.

“Settle something for us,” Alana says, gesturing across the table with a pickle spear. “True or false—Cooper has his dick tattooed.”

I almost cough up a french fry. “What?”

“A few years back, there was this story about some chick who got banged on the roof of the police station on Fourth of July weekend,” Steph says beside me. “And there was a picture going around of a dude with a tattoo on his dick, but we never nailed down who it was.”

“You didn’t ask Heidi this question?”

The girls stare at me with apprehension.

“What, was I not supposed to know about that?” My tone is glib. I’d thought it was obvious those two had been hooking up at some point in the recent past.