Mac sighed drearily as she looked out across the San Francisco Bay. She was supposed to be happy. Her future was glowing and spectacular and prestigious and academic. She wasn't supposed to be feeling like taking a quick step and tumbling off of this hill into where ever it was that people who jumped went.
And there she went again.
She was sitting on a short rock wall next to Grizzly Peak Road. The view was of the Berkeley and Oakland Hills, the bay itself and San Francisco. It was cold, the wind biting into her face and neck. She had toured UC Berkeley that day. They were ready to offer her a full ride, twice as much as Hearst was offering. The entire time, she hadn't been able to stop thinking about Cassidy.
Mac stared out at The City, as the locals called it. She liked that. The City. Like it was some fantasy place that everyone knew, like Oz or Never Never Land. As the sun went down, the lights of The City glimmered and the Golden Gate Bridge was tattooed against the orange and pink sky.
Her mother had been sad during the tour but she knew that Mac would be happier in a place like Berkeley then she ever would be at home, especially after what had happened after graduation. If one thing could be said for Trixie McKenzie, it was that even if she never understood her daughter, she knew her. She had made all the necessary calls to Hearst and Berkeley to arrange the late registration. Trixie had asked all the questions she thought were pertinent while Mac had sat quietly, wondering how many girls went to college virgins.
Mac had appreciated what her mother had done for her. But the image of Cassidy…Cassidy, who she was almost sure that she had been in love with, trying to kill Veronica, killing all of those people on the bus, raping her best friend…
Mac got into the rented Accord her mother had picked up at the Oakland Airport that morning and drove down to the freeway, deciding that she should get away from all of these things, college, Cassidy (iBeaver/i she silently corrected herself), thoughts of Veronica and Cassidy, thoughts of her whole life in Neptune.
The drive into San Francisco had been uneventful. The sky had dimmed and then darkened. The high rises shone and Mac could feel dizziness setting in. She had a bit of agoraphobia in big cities like this from time to time, but she tightened her grip on the wheel of the car, took a deep breath and it passed.
She didn't go into the Castro or the Haight as she had planned when she was driving over the bridge. She wound up lost and in Union Square. She parked, balking at the ridiculous rates in the garage.
Outside, a crowd of people bogarting the sidewalk squished her into a line for something. A bouncer, big but not fat, sucking a lollipop and wearing all black pulled her forward. "You're in. Need more pretty girls in there." He smiled at her from behind his sunglasses.
Mac rolled her eyes at this. She wondered if Beaver had even thought she was pretty. She couldn't remember him ever saying it.
iMust not be. After all he didn't even want to fuck me…/i
She was shocked by the thought, by the hostility of it.
She climbed the purple-lit stairs to the dance floor. The beat pulsed and seemed to grind through the speakers and through her toes to her fingertips. She could almost recognize the voice of the woman singing. It made her feel even more lost then she had before.
A guy approached her and started to gyrate against her back, nearly knocking her over. She started to walk away but then decided to just dance with him. What difference was dancing with one stranger in one club going to make?
Somehow, with all displacement of the evening, she wasn't surprised when Logan Echolls materialized in front of her.
"Mac. Hey."
He was shouting but she couldn't hear any exclamation points in his voice.
"Logan."
She took him by the hand and led him over to the bar, looking a bit wistfully over her shoulder at her now abandoned dance partner.
"Of all the gin joints and all the cities in all the world…" Mac quipped. Logan gave her a little half smile. He turned to the bartender. "Two Incredible Hulks please."
The bartender grimaced at him. "Where the hell do you think you are? Richmond?"
"Hey, am I tipping you for a geography lesson or for a couple of fucking drinks?" Logan flashed her his big cheesecake smile. She glared at him and stalked toward the backlit wall of bottles.
"So what might you be doing in this fair and fucking freezing part of the world?"
Logan looked at Mac with vague interest.
Mac suddenly didn't feel like telling Logan a goddamn thing about what she was doing in San Francisco
(iThe City/i she corrected herself)
or furthermore what she was doing in this very flashy, very high-end, very not her club.
"I could ask you the same thing."
"Well to quote a greater man then me, 'I came for the booze and the bitches.'" He turned to her, one eyebrow cocked, waiting for a reaction. She didn't say anything.
Their drinks arrived. Logan swilled his in one gulp, simultaneously slamming a twenty down on the bar. "What the hell is this?" Mac asks, staring at the opaque, swirling green in her martini glass.
"Hpnotiq and cognac. It's a local favorite. Or rather, it's a local favorite except in this bar."
Mac sipped at it cautiously. She was completely aware that one drink would probably be enough to trash her. She looked at Logan again. He was giving her an odd look. "So you haven't answered my question."
"Do you really expect me to?"
"Not really. Dance with me."
Mac stared at him. "What?"
"Dance with me."
Mac's mind flashed to Veronica, somewhere in New York City with her dad. Were they…? Had they…?
Logan grabbed her by the hand and pulled her from her barstool, spinning her off onto the dance floor where, for some inexplicable reason, iTake Me To The Riot/i by Stars was playing.
He was too close to her. But Mac didn't say anything. She was having a hard time making herself believe that any of this was happening.
"You saw Beaver die, didn't you?"
Logan let out a harsh, short laugh. "Well I saw him jump." He pulled her even closer to him, his knee separating her legs. He rubbed up against her. She still didn't pull away, even with the thoughts of Veronica and Cassidy running around in her head.
Because it was there, with someone so familiar but so distant, in a city she didn't know, that she could finally do what she'd been trying to do for the last two weeks: forget who she was supposed to be.
And while all of her instincts and possibly every organ in her body screamed against it, she tilted her head up and kissed Logan. It was nothing like kissing Cassidy (iBeaver/i her mind chided, iBeaver, not Cassidy/i)
it was more…more like what she'd imagined when she'd thought about kissing Cass-Beaver. She could taste the tang of the drink on his tongue and it made her thirsty.
For the first time in her life, Cindy McKenzie had no idea what the hell she was doing.
Logan had somehow gotten her to walk the five blocks to his hotel, folded her into the elevator and felt her up against the door to his room without any complaint.
It seemed like the seediest thing he had ever done: the best friend, another city, a hotel room. Mac had no idea what was going on with him and Veronica. The last time she'd seen them, they had been all lovey-dovey, all-sins-forgiven happy. Now, he swiped his key card as quickly as possible, as if erasing all of their shared past, and now the two of them were just strangers.
Before she knew it, Mac was laying in front of him, naked on his hotel bed. She didn't really know what she was feeling. It wasn't fear or lust or shame. But she spread her legs and grabbed him by the shirt, undoing the buttons in an almost robotic efficient manner. This seemed to strike him as almost unbearably funny and he burst out laughing.
Then he could see the hurt in her eyes. "It's not you…well it is…it's just…you've never done this have you?"
Mac shakes her head, sitting up. "Why?"
He was quiet, looking at her with utmost frustration. Maybe he was thinking that it was a great revenge tactic. But still, a virgin? That was pretty low. Like, Dick low. She waited for him to say as much, furthermore to add that she ishould/i lose it to Dick, after all, wouldn't that be the perfect revenge on her dead fag of a boyfriend?
"Why?" she repeated, a bit more forcefully.
"No reason."
He unbuckled his belt and undid his jeans. Mac lay back down. She hoped that he'd say something that would snap her out of this weird…defiance. Or did she mean distance?
Mac was almost sure that losing her virginity to her best friend's (ionly friend's/i her mind chided) ex boyfriend was definitely not normal. And it was also pretty skeezy. And honestly, when she thought about it, kind of hot. In a really, really ethically wrong way. She said as much to Logan, who only chortled and slipped off his jeans saying, "Well I failed that class."
When he first thrust into her, it was painful. And it kept being painful. But the upshot was that Beaver was the last thing on her mind. She even liked it a little, when Logan had…well, when he had done all the right things in all the right places. Mac hadn't been too sure about any of it at all.
In the morning they both lay next to each other. It was more out of curiosity then anything else, much like the previous night had been about escape.
"You know," Logan began. "You're pretty."
Mac gave him a small grin. They were both lying on their stomachs, facing each other.
"Yeah? You aren't just saying that because I am, I mean, I was a virgin and now you feel all noble and obligated or something?"
Logan gave her an exaggerated thinking look. "I know isomeone/i told me I was supposed to do that. An article in Cosmo maybe. Anyway, can't remember, so the answer is, in fact, no."
Mac actually laughed at that.
"So, are we going to make a pact that we will never speak to Veronica of this?" he asked, eyebrows raised.
"If we ever see her again. I might just stay here for the rest of the summer before I move into the dorms."
"Dorms?"
"That's why I was here. To tour UC Berkeley and appeal for late registration."
"I knew you lied when you said it was just to get a piece of this fine ass." Logan let out a long sigh. "Just like a woman."
They were both quiet. It was an awkward silence, the kind ripe with the wrong thing to say.
"I'm sorry you know." Logan said abruptly.
"For what?"
"For not being Beaver, the love of your life or whoever. I mean, it must kind of suck to have lost it to me."
Mac sighed. Usually, whenever anyone mentioned Cassidy, she got all teary or standoffish and had to fight the urge to bolt. But now, it seemed sad, yes, as well as enormously unfair, for her to be so smart, but stupid enough to have fallen in love with someone like Beaver. But it wasn't the same as it had been before. It just felt like a tender bruise instead of terminal cancer. Which was nice, in a way.
"So you were here just to…what exactly? Party? Come out? Have sex with your ex girlfriend's best friend? Something even more convoluted?"
"No, actually." Logan turned his face into the pillow. Mac couldn't tell what he said next, with his voice muffled the way it was.
"What?"
"I'm visiting the State campus in San Francisco. It was the only school I got into."
Mac laughed. "And that's iso/i embarrassing? Dick didn't even graduate."
"Says the future Berkeley student?"
Mac scoffed. "Hey Berkeley is a state school too. Just a much more exclusive one."