As I pat his furry gray and blond head, my mind gradually catches up.
Prior.
My old dog.
The dog She-Voldemort took.
Here in my house.
I look up towards the entrance to the living room, already knowing whom I’ll see there. And I hate to admit it, but she looks as gorgeous as ever, pale skin accentuated by a red crop top and a yellow tulle skirt, dark hair in a tight ballet bun on the top of her head. As always, she looks a hundred percent New York, a hundred percent fashionable, and a hundred percent unattainable. There used to be a time when I felt like the luckiest guy in the world.
“Hi, Raven,” I say, scooping the Yorkie up in my arms and standing.
“Hi, Logan.”
They’re literally the first words we’ve said to each other since she left.
She steps forward into the light, and I see her face clearly. Delicate, almost European features. Bright red lips. Eyes limned with the blackest kohl.
“So did you just let yourself in or what?”
“I still have a key,” she says primly. “And I thought it was time that we finally talk. After all, you didn’t come find me after you saw me being fucked at Vida’s.”
Entitlement, manipulation and a dose of guilt, all in three sentences.
Yep, it’s definitely her, all right.
“What is there to talk about, Raven?” I ask, willing myself to put down the dog and escort her to the door. Except I can’t put the dog down because I’ve fucking missed the shit out of this dog, and I’d bet everything I own that Raven knows that, and brought him for the sole purpose of throwing me off-balance.
She takes a step forward. “Don’t act with me, Logan. We both know that you were never a good actor.”
Jesus. Going for the balls already.
“I’ve never pretended to be a good actor,” I say as pleasantly as I can while still gritting my teeth.
“Oh, that’s right. You wanted to be Logan O’Toole, erotic auteur, am I right?”
“What did you want to talk about again?” I repeat, my eyes sliding away from her to the door, wondering how I could make her move towards it. “Because if you came here just to make me feel shitty, I think I’d rather you left.”
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 fucking dog. And all so you could gallivant across Europe and fuck some Italian?”
“It wasn’t that simple,” she insists. “And it wasn’t fucking 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 fuckdoll. 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 fucking 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.”