Porn Star(44)

Raven glances down at the floor, rubbing the back of her right calf with the toe of her left foot, encased in some expensive ankle-boot thing that straddles the line between haute couture and Skid Row. “I didn’t come here to make you feel shitty,” she says after a minute. “I’m sorry about that. I guess I’m feeling defensive because...well, you know why.”

There’s silence. If this is her apology, her actual play to win over my time and energy, then it’s not enough. “I think I do know why, Raven. You left me. You didn’t talk to me about it, you didn’t leave a note or a voicemail, you just left. I couldn’t even tell people that we ‘broke up,’ because you did all the breaking. You broke my heart, you almost broke my career, and you certainly broke my mind, at least for a little while.” Prior reaches up to lick my neck. “Oh yeah, and you took my f*cking dog. And all so you could gallivant across Europe and f*ck some Italian?”

“It wasn’t that simple,” she insists. “And it wasn’t f*cking easy. Do you think I woke up one day, and was like, ‘Oh, I’ll just throw away three years of my life because I want someone who can read the menu at a pasta place’? It was the hardest decision of my life, walking away from you, and I thought it would be better for me if I left with a clean break.”

“Well, I’m so glad you made the decision that was better for you,” I say bitterly.

Raven throws up her hands. “You’re deliberately twisting my words. I only meant that if I had tried to talk it over with you, if I’d lingered in your house—in your bed—then I would have ended up staying.”

“And what would have been so terrible about that?” I say, and it comes out broken and hushed, a deathbed whisper, and I hate myself for it. I don’t want to show her a single iota of weakness. She doesn’t deserve to know how thoroughly she wrecked me.

But as soon as it’s said, her face changes. Not into an expression of pity—I probably would have lit my own house on fire if I’d seen even the barest trace of pity on her face—but of pleading.

“Logan,” she says, begging. “Please understand. I had to leave for my own sanity, for my own life. Everywhere we went, I was your girlfriend. Every industry party, every joint shoot...every solo shoot for that matter, I wasn’t Raven Fleur, I was Logan O’Toole’s f*ckdoll. Rumors started that I was only getting jobs because of you, that I would never be able to work if we broke up, and I started to think they might be right. I’ve been working in this business since I was seventeen, and for the first time in twelve years, I doubted every decision I made. I started to lose a sense of who Raven was, the work she liked to do, because it was so hugely eclipsed by your…” She gestures to me, to the freshly cleaned couch behind me. “Just you. Not only your business—I could have handled that. But your vision. Your you-ness. You didn’t leave any room for me to create my own world.”

I am immediately defensive. “I never, not even once, told you what kind of jobs to take or what kind of scenes to film. I never pressured you to be any more involved with O’Toole films than you wanted to be. And I would certainly never—”

“Logan,” she interrupts. “You’ve never had to pressure anybody in your life. Don’t you f*cking get it? People fall all over themselves trying to make you happy. One tweet reply from you, one smile across the room at a party, and you win friends for life. And me?” Her mouth twists up in a rueful smile. “I was so desperate for your smiles, to be inside that playful but intense inner circle, that I was sacrificing myself in advance.”

“You should have told me,” I maintain. ‘“You should have talked to me!”

“And said what? Exactly what I just said, and then have you say exactly what you’ve just said, and then feel both reassured and ignored at the same time? Or worse, ready to go willingly back to my personal prison?”

I turn away from her, walking back towards the window overlooking the pool. I’m too angry and hurt to think clearly, even though I recognize the grains of truth in her words. I can be a little monomaniacal about my projects, and I do have a bad habit of wanting everyone I care about to be involved with all the same things I care about too. And maybe if I’d been a more sensitive boyfriend, I would have seen that Raven felt stifled in our creative partnership even as our domestic partnership still sailed steady atop smooth seas.

But it doesn’t excuse her cowardice. Or her infidelity.

“You did so much more than try to renew your career when you left. You didn’t even pay me the courtesy of a goodbye, not to mention the Italian guy.”

She clears her throat, and I realize she’s come up very close behind me. “I was wrong to do that. Luca and I...we were seeing each other for a while before I left.”

I know this. I have known this for months. So why does her admission spark so much rage inside of me? It should be old news, and besides, it took some courage for her to admit that. She never did like admitting she was wrong.

Once I can trust my voice, I speak, still keeping my eyes on the pool. “I wish you and Luca the best. And I suppose I feel more enlightened now than before we talked, so thank you for that.”

“Luca and I broke up,” she says quickly, before I can get to the part where I ask her to leave. “It wasn’t real, Logan, it never was. He was just in the right place at the right time, able to tell me all the things I wanted to hear.”