(Andy Grammar – Don't Give Up on Me)
Glancing at his watch Logan sighed. Time was incendiary.
Veronica would still be at Sheriff Lambs funeral with her dad. This was a risk.
Mac was like a frightened gazelle staked down in the lion's den.
"Do you think we should head back?" Parker asked curling her fingers around her coffee thankful for the warmth glancing beyond the nurses station.
How could a building in California of all places be so damn cold?
Logan shook his head. "No, you were right, we need to give them a chance to work through this on their own."
"Stuck between your girlfriend, her bestie and your roommate, it must be really awkward to choose which side you come down on all this if it all ends in litigation and retraining orders," Parker replied and he could feel she was trying to get some sense of on where his loyalties lay. Even she had a difficult time with all the grey. Dick had saved Mac's life… then again he had also threatened to destroy it first using his Goliath sized millions and take her baby away, so she wasn't about to stop sharpening her axe just yet.
Dick Casablancas would not be throwing his weight around if she had anything to say about it. She just had to decide of Logan was ally or foe.
"It won't come to that," Logan assured her. "He's not a bad person, there is just a lot going on with him right now."
It was unsettling to think that this would put him and Veronica at odds if it went badly.
Timing was everything…
The unresolved feelings over his brothers suicide, his father's re-emergence because the man didn't have the decency to stay under whatever rock he'd fled to after bankrupting half the residence of Neptune.
Men like Dick intrinsically mistrusted women and the brain ran that scenario every day, all day long.—Eve, Delilah, or Jezebel. The lesson was simple, women will lie about who they are and what they like to do to find a mate.
Emotions occur in the old brain, where there is no thinking, just "survive now and ask questions later." Intellect was a cortical event and on discovering Mac was pregnant, Dick had felt deceived. He'd just needed some time to re-align his head and his heart.
It would be difficult to explain to someone the changes he'd seen in his roommate over the last few months. Clear signs that he couldn't get enough of the short brunette since the morning Logan had caught Mac sneaking from the hotel room.
Yet the proof was there in the goofy look Dick got if he caught sight of her across a crowded cafeteria. The way he talked about Mac all the time. His constant need for wingman advice in how to 'hunt' her down.
The nervous cray cray behavior as he paced apartment until it disappeared with a secret smile when her name flashed up on his screen were all signs that Dick was falling hard. Their friends call and ask for him to meet them at a bar but Dick would pass on the invitation to spend time with her instead. The way he'd binged watched every episode of Mr Robot and Silicon Valley, listened to her favorite bands as they held some algorithm to help him figure out day-to-day life is like from her perspective.
The most bewildering piece of evidence in the case of Dick Loves Mac had been when Logan came home to find Dick returning from a private cooking lesson for tofu meatballs with the Neptune Grand chef so he could impress Mac.
They had kept everything low key at first, but Logan had watched them together, he'd seen Dick's heartbreak when he thought she'd betrayed him, he'd shared Mac's anguish when they weren't sure if his friend was going to make it out of surgery.
"Man is the hunter; woman is his game. The sleek and shining creatures of the chase, we hunt them for the beauty of their skins; they love us for it, and we ride them down." Dick had quoted Alfred Tennyson one afternoon when Logan had asked him why he was paying some computer science student to hack into Mac's laptop.
Absence created anticipation and a feeling of "If I don't see her now, I'll die." Mac had run.. and Dick had chased. Logan was sure that she hadn't done it intentionally to make him feel like he had to fight for her attention even though they locked limbs on a regular basis. But women like Madison would have relished that power and used it to their advantage, and a predator/prey game was destructive to whatever trust needed to be rebuilt between them.
There was no version of this ending where they would be better off without each other but young hearts ran free, and sometimes they got lost.
