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He was clean shaven now with a fresh haircut and a new girl, and he gave Raven a wide berth as he passed by.
"You're too good for him," Bellamy said, and Raven wanted to believe him. Wanted to believe that Wick the Dick, Wick the Slick, wasn't good enough for her. Kyle had just been playing around, and all his ridiculous declarations about wanting a girlfriend were really just him wanting a woman who could understand what he was saying when he went full nerd. There weren't many of them left from Engineering and Mechanical, and she had bigger breasts than the only other woman who might be able to fix the flaws in his designs.
And so she had dumped him. The words hadn't been hard - "I don't want what you say you want" - but making them stick was. He'd tried to refuse to believe it and then tried to talk her out of it. They were friends, in a way, and the sex was good, but he'd refused to accept she knew her own mind. He'd pushed and shoved and demanded what he thought he was due until the hassle of sex with him was greater than the pleasure.
No one had ever told her that one day someone might want her for more than her company and her body. Whatever the other thing was that he'd tried to demand - her heart, her soul, the air in her lungs - it had felt like oppression. She'd wanted the freedom to go where she wanted and do what needed doing, and his insistence on having voice in her decisions, a voice in her head, felt like a dictate from the Council.
Too bad for him. The Council was irrelevant even if they did still prop up a figurehead. The Ark had crashed. They'd been through three chancellors in six months. Four if you gave Diana credit for the few moments she'd taken control. The Council could make all the decisions it wanted. It didn't matter. Lexa had betrayed them. Clarke had saved them. Indra had stolen Octavia's loyalty, and Octavia had stolen herself back.
Earth had its own rules.
No one had ever told Raven that boys would be irrelevant. She'd known not to let them rule her the way her mother had, but still... Finn. She'd rebooted her entire life for Finn. For a boy who hadn't loved her so much after all. She'd given up everything chasing after him, and then he'd left her and died, and she'd kept living. She'd always thought he was the tether that kept her safe on the spacewalk that was her life, but it turned out he only anchored her if she let him. She'd tried to hold on to the memory of him and it had nearly drug her under. He was gone, and there was a hollow place in her heart where he used to live, but still she kept on living.
Her chest ached and her arms felt empty and her bed was too cold at night. She hated it even as she leaned into the pain. As she looked at the people around her, the hollowed out shell of Jasper, the stoic near seclusion of Lincoln, she knew that real love had a cost and Wick had too recently proven the price of short term comfort. Still, she longed for someone who was hers and hers alone, the way she'd thought Finn was. Maybe he really had been for a while on the Ark. Maybe it had been the Earth that had killed their love, but it had lived for a while in the sky.
No one had ever told her that sexual favors had an expiration date. She'd bedded Bellamy months ago, and almost immediately it was as if it had never happened. All her life she'd tried to ignore the lessons of her mother, actively fought them when she found herself wandering down those paths. She'd never traded her body for favors, never gone with a coy smile instead of a sharp remark, but still she'd soaked in a certain way of seeing the world. Men wanted one thing, and once they had it from you either you came out on top or they did. But it hadn't been that way with Bellamy. She'd walked out the tent door and that had been the end of it. No winner. No loser. Not even quite friends then even though they were now.
No one had ever told her that she could be so alone when surrounded by friends.
No one ever told her what makes life worth living.