Page 84 of The Beautiful Collision
Stop thinking about him!
I force myself to focus on the present. On Henley Guy, whose name I haven’t bothered to learn and definitely won’t remember in the morning. He isn’t my type—I can tell that already—because he’s not smart enough, not witty enough, and not quick enough.
Not… Maine enough.
But he’shere.
And he wants me.
Needsme.
He’s breathing and warm and letting me call the shots. His body is solid against mine, real in a way that my memories aren’t. And right now, the loneliness is a gnawing, cavernous thing inside me, so vast and deep I’m afraid I might fall into it and never climb back out.
For a moment, I think this might work.
Maybe the burn of his skin against mine, the friction of a stranger’s body under my command, could cauterize the wound for a few hours. Maybe if I take him home—no, not home, Maine might be there, so his place—I might cure myself with the hollow satisfaction of making someone want me.
Maybe I can fuck Maine Hamilton out of my system.
But as I grind my hips against him, as his hands get more insistent and his breath comes hotter against my neck, my stomach rebels. It’s not just the tequila, though that’s certainly not helping. It’s the sudden, violent understanding that this isn’t going to work.
That no amount of strangers’ hands on my body is going to erase the memory of the one pair of hands I actually want, but whose owner rejected me.
The nausea hits like a tidal wave and my control, the thing I pride myself on most, shatters like glass. I spin away from him without a word, leaving him standing there with his arms still held in the shape of my body, and rush through the crowd to the bathroom.
I barely make it.
The stall door bangs against the wall as I fall to my knees, and then everything I’ve drunk tonight comes up in violent, humiliating waves. The toilet bowl is disgusting—God knows when it was last properly cleaned—but I’m past caring. My body convulses, expelling the tequila and the pain.
I’m sobbing between retches, great, ugly sobs that echo off the bathroom walls. My carefully applied makeup is running in black rivers down my cheeks. My hair, which I spent an hour styling into waves, is now hanging in limp strands, threatening to fall into the toilet.
And that’s when the thought hits me, sharp and brutal in its clarity:There’s no one here to hold my hair.
Such a simple thing. Such a basic act of care. Sophie would have done it if I hadn’t driven her away with my cruelty. Maine would have, just like he took care of me that night on the kitchen floor. About how he saw me at my absolute worst and still looked at me like I was something precious.
Until he didn’t.
Until he pulled away and left me wondering what I’d done wrong, what part of my authentic self was so repulsive that he couldn’t stand to be in the same room with me anymore. So now, I’m utterly, completely alone in my mess. As I’ve always been.
As I was probably always meant to be.
When the heaving finally stops, I struggle to my feet, using the questionably clean stall walls for support. My legs feel like water, my head spinning from dehydration and despair in equalmeasure. I stumble to the sink, avoiding my reflection in the mirror, because I don’t need to see to know it’s bad.
I rinse my mouth, my hands are shaking as I try to clean the mascara from under my eyes, but it’s a lost cause. I look exactly like what I am: a disaster. And a shitty situation is made even better when the bathroom door opens and two girls stumble in, giggling and holding each other up.
They take one look at me, and their laughter dies.
“Oh, babe,” one of them says, her voice full of the kind of pity I’ve been running from all night. “Rough night?”
I can’t even answer. Can’t summon the energy for a lie or a deflection or my usual armor of sharp words. I just push past them and back into the bar, where the thumping bass that felt energizing an hour ago just feels totally nauseating now.
Instead of heading back to the bar or the dance floor, I collapse into a deserted booth in the corner. The worn seat is sticky against my cheek as I curl onto my side, pulling my knees up to my chest. And it’s clear, now, that the show’s over, and all that’s left is a drunk, sad girl in a dirty booth, crying tears that won’t stop.
I close my eyes, and the grimy, spinning darkness of the bar gives way to an even deeper, more absolute black. The last thing I think before unconsciousness claims me is that somewhere, maybe at the apartment, Maine is suffering just as much as I am.
And we’re both doing it alone.
Because that’s what people like us do. We perform and pretend and push everyone away, and then we wonder why we’re drowning with no one to throw us a rope. And, the one time the two stars of their own show did forge a connection, it broke within seconds.
