Himself. Her.
To his heart, it amounted to the same thing, in the end.
He knew it was killing her to walk away.
And still she was doing it.
His whole life system clearly had a flaw if Avalon Harwood wanted to get away from him. How could she not understand that he would literally rather die than deliberately hurt her? And yet apparently just being himself was guaranteed to bring her pain.
The Cat came and sat down next to him. Mac reflexively dropped one of his arms down. The Cat did all the work, rubbing his head to and fro all over Mac’s distracted hand.
Breathing helped. So he just did that for a little while.
He might not be good at parsing out feelings. But he did know how to build things and repair things; he knew how to methodically solve structural problems. And now that his head was a little clearer he felt able to sort through the snarl of words, to peel them from their casings of emotions, feeling around intuitively for that beginning thread that he could follow out of the mess.
And he found both the cause and solution.
She was so scared to trust him that instead of staying here she was going right back to a life that didn’t fit her. That in fact flattened her, dimmed her light. She knew and he knew it. She was going to be miserable.
Hewas scared, too. Standing-on-a-crumbling-cliff’s-edge scared.
And yet he would do just about anything to make her feel safe in the world.
And in light of that, his own fear underwent an alchemical reaction akin to spinning straw into gold. His fear became courage. Her fear became his cause.
He knew how to fix this. And he knew how to do it the right way. A way that had such structural integrity and permanence she couldn’t doubt it or him, or his feelings, or hers, ever again.
And whether she realized it or not, she was the one who’d already all but told him what to do.
Funnily, if Mike had paid him back the ten grand, he might not be on the precipice of getting everything he ever wanted. Next time he saw Mike, he was going to tell him he was basically a Fairy Godfather.
Mac was feeling a lot more like himself. His palms were a little sweaty, sure. But he could do this.
He reached for his phone, and pulled up a contact, and pressed a number he’d never even dialed from this phone.
Like they always said: go big or go home.
For Avalon... he would do both.