Chapter Twenty-Eight. Mackenzie
chapter twenty-eight
MACKENZIE
I try not to think about it now, but there was a time between being Mackenzie Waters and being Seven when I wasn’t anything at all.
Thunder Hearts was over. My voice wasn’t my own.
And suddenly everything was so—quiet. No color-coded weekly calendars from Serena in my inbox.
No more of Hannah’s raucous dinners with Thunder Hearts and Candy Shard on the road.
No more belted songs, no more roaring crowds, no more me .
Everything that had defined the beats of my life for years was gone.
Suddenly there was space for too much to crawl back in.
The heartbreak. The shame. The losses I never got over, but thought I did because everything was go, go, go for so long that there wasn’t time to feel anything.
You can’t see the pain at the bottom of yourself when you’re standing at the top of the world.
I didn’t realize how bad it was until I came unglued at Serena about the duo idea. After that I went to therapy. I went as far as I could into the ugly parts of myself, trying to pull them back out. But once I had ahold of them, I didn’t know how to let them go.
So I turned to the only cure I could think of—I pulled out my guitar. I tried to sing. It wasn’t my voice anymore, but it didn’t need to be. All it needed to do was release me.
I posted to Tick Tune. “Seven,” I called myself. A tally of the men who had let me down, and a countdown to when I could finally be free of them.
It worked too damn well. It’s been a day since I was unmasked, and now Seven is making headlines all over the internet, and Sam hasn’t returned a single damn one of my calls. I’m right back where I started—thrust right back to the top of the world, trying not to look down at the pain below.
On top of the literal world, even. I’ve been holed up in Serena’s high-rise apartment all day.
The paparazzi are planted on my sidewalk and all the talk from Isla and the label has been making my head spin, so this was the only place other than the damn Hole I could go to hide.
These stolen moments I’m taking up on the roof are the first times I’ve been able to take a breath all day.
I don’t turn when the door to the stairwell opens, expecting Serena. There’s a storm coming. She’ll want us to get inside before it hits. But then a few seconds pass, and the shift in the air is unmistakable.
It’s Sam. Rueful and tired and way too far from me. I want to cross the distance to him, want to bury myself in his worn-out T-shirt and breathe in the burnt honey of him, but I can’t. Not when he’s staring at me like he’s every bit as much at a loss as I am.
I swallow hard, drawing myself up. I will not be weak. I will not put any more of my mess on him. Especially not if he’s here to do the one thing I fear most.
“I’m sorry,” I tell him.
The words come out steady, but then everything else goes to shit. My eyes well up so fast that Sam is just a blur against the clouded skyline. My body is shaking so hard that I don’t feel Sam pull me in until he has his arms around me, holding me to him like a port in a storm.
I shake my head. He can’t be the one comforting me right now. But Sam settles a hand on the back of my neck, lightly digging his fingers into my hair to stop me.
“I’m sorry,” I say again, “and I’m so glad Ben is all right.”
Sam nods against the side of my head. “Scared the hell out of me. But he’s already running around like nothing happened.”
I have no trouble picturing that. If there’s one thing Ben got from Sam, it’s toeing that fine line between determined and reckless.
My throat goes thick at the thought. Of all the awful things I’ve considered in the past day of Sam’s silence, the idea of not being a part of Ben’s life anymore is among the worst.
Sam’s voice is a low rumble against my chest, hoarse in my ear. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
There were so many times I rehearsed this conversation in my head, but now that it’s here, I’m drawing a blank. I don’t want to say another word. I want to stay right here in Sam’s arms, as if it might be the last time I ever get to be held in them.
But he deserves answers. That’s the least I can give.
“I didn’t mean to tell anyone about Seven,” I say.
Sam’s fingers press comfortingly into the back of my neck, weaving into my hair. “I meant about the way you were hurting.”
My eyes are still crushed shut against him. I’m afraid if I open them, the tears will spill out.
“That song was never supposed to go live,” I say as evenly as I can. “I wrote it before we started working together. It’s not how I feel about you.”
“But it was how you felt,” says Sam quietly.
My fists curl around the back of his shirt. “I couldn’t. You knew it, too. You were right to stop anything from happening back then. You needed that time with Ben, and I needed that time to process.”
He pulls back just enough to look at my face.
I’m right about the tears. They stream down my face, chasing after each other so fast that I can barely see through them.
He settles both hands on my cheeks, catching them in the crook of his thumb, staring at me so tenderly that for the first time, I wish he wouldn’t. I don’t deserve it.
“You snuck up on me,” I say as evenly as I can manage. “I would have told you how I felt before the bands broke up. But it just— happened , after we wrote that first song together. It was all just bad timing.”
The breath Sam pulls in is ragged, his words thick.
“It didn’t sneak up on me,” he confesses.
“From the first damn day I was—so in over my head, the way I felt about you. I was trying to do the right thing, staying away. I didn’t think I could be what you needed.
I didn’t get there fast enough.” He strokes his thumb on my cheek. “It wasn’t bad timing. It was me.”
This confession isn’t what stuns me from my tears. It’s the stark difference between this conversation and too many that I’ve had just like it. The conversation where something has gone wrong and someone needs to take the blame.
Only now nobody’s trying to give it to each other. We’re trying to take it on ourselves. The way two people do when they have something neither of them can bear to lose.
I tilt my chin into his touch. “All of that was in the past,” I say. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”
Sam shakes his head sharply. “It does matter. You matter.” He draws me in, touching his forehead to mine. “It kills me thinking I ever let you think anything different. If I’d had any idea, I wouldn’t have—”
He stops himself short.
“What?” I prompt him. When he doesn’t answer, a chill goes up my spine. “You wouldn’t have done Mack and Sam?”
Sam keeps his hands framed on my face as he pulls back. “I’ll never regret a moment of that,” he says, eyes steady on mine. “But we both know it’s got to end.”
My blood runs cold. “Don’t say that.”
“Twyla told me the plan. I think it’s a good one,” he insists. “You’re a once-in-a-lifetime talent, Mackenzie, and you deserve all the success with Seven coming your way.”
Sam still hasn’t let go, but I put my hands on top of his like I’m scared he might. I need him to hear this. I need him to understand.
“Seven is finished,” I tell him. “Everything is deleted. I’m never going to talk about it publicly. I spent the whole day making that clear.”
To everyone but Sam, it seems. “You haven’t heard them out,” he says lowly. “Twyla said the label could use you to advocate for the other Tick Tune artists. You might change your mind. Give it a few days, at least.”
Serena and I have done enough digging today to know that’s not true about the label, but it isn’t worth getting into right now.
“I won’t,” I say.
Sam tilts my face as I try to look away. The love in his eyes isn’t just plain, but burning. Like he’s ready to light himself on fire with it.
“I want the whole damn world for you,” he says, his voice hoarse. “You’ve already got it in the palm of your hand. Nobody’s stopping you on my watch, least of all me.”
I swallow hard. The words he said that night in Boston cut through my panic like a knife: That woman’s either gonna change my life, or end life as I know it.
He’s not the one stopping me. I’m the one stopping him .
I stumble back from his touch. His eyes widen, stunned and hurt. I reach out and grab his hands before he can lower them, intertwining our fingers, pulling them to my chest.
“You’re not listening to me, Sam. I don’t want to be Seven. I never did. From the moment I made her, it was to get rid of her,” I say, squeezing hard. “I didn’t want to live with all that heartbreak anymore, so I let it go. But I don’t want to let you go.”
Sam’s eyes search my face, the hurt shifting to bewilderment.
“I’m not going anywhere. You know that, right?” he says. “This isn’t me walking away from you. This is me telling you that whatever future we have, Mack and Sam isn’t in it.”
I shake my head, because this isn’t happening. Not after all this. We didn’t get past this whole rivalry, past two years of unbearable silence, past these weeks we’ve spent picking up every broken piece of that past to give up on the future we started building with them.
“We’ll show them at the showcase,” I tell him. My heart is pounding, the adrenaline a tidal wave in my blood. “I have a whole plan. Or at least an idea of one, but Serena’s got Grayson looking at the—”
“I pulled out of the showcase,” says Sam.
I drop his hands. The words feel like a collision, and I’m too stunned to figure out how hard I’ve been hit.
“You what?” I manage.
Sam’s eyes search mine, sorry but resolute. “I thought you knew,” he says. “They’re billing it as a Seven show. The tickets are already on sale.”