Page 64 of The Beautiful Collision
A sound that shouldn’t exist in our apartment, a small, choked sobbing. It’s almost inhuman, like someone’s trying to swallow broken glass, the kind of noise that makes your whole body tense up before your brain even processes what you’re hearing.
I freeze in the entryway.
Maya?
The sound is coming from the kitchen, and there’s only one other person who should be here. My feet move before I make the conscious decision, carrying me around the corner with the kind of cautious dread usually reserved for walking into crime scenes, and what I find stops me cold.
This can’t be Maya.
Maya doesn’t do this.
Maya is all wit and sass and controlled chaos. Maya is the woman who can eviscerate someone with a smile, who treats vulnerability like a disease, who wears fun like a shield that’s welded to her skin. But there she is, curled up on the kitchen floor like she’s trying to disappear inside herself.
Her shoulders shake with the kind of sobs that come from somewhere deep and primal, the kind that leave you feeling hollowed out and raw. Her dark hair—usually so perfectly styled even when she claims she just “threw it up”—hangs in tangled curtains around her face.
She looks small.
She looks destroyed.
And it hits me like a slap-shot to the chest—this isn’t the formidable opponent I’m supposed to be conquering for a bet. This isn’t the Ice Queen or the Wild Stallion or any of the other bullshit labels I or others have thrown around. This is raw, unfiltered, completely shattered Maya.
The bet feels like something from another lifetime. These past few weeks since the club, since we started this unspoken thing where we’re together but nottogether, where we sleep in the same bed but still retreat to our separate rooms after like we’re afraid of what morning might bring…
Well, it’s all been a careful dance around the truth.
I know I could win the bet with three words.
I love you.
They’ve been sitting on my tongue for weeks, heavy and dangerous. I’m pretty sure she’d say them back, because I’ve seen it in the way she looks at me when she thinks I’m not watching, and felt it in the way her body relaxes into mine when we’re tangled together in the dark.
But I’ve held off saying it myself and deflected every time she’s gotten close to breaching that invisible wall between us.Because saying those words means dealing with the bet, with the money I can’t afford to lose, with the inevitability of breaking her heart when she says those words and then finds out what I’ve done.
What a fucking choice.
Win the bet and lose her.
Lose the bet and go broke.
Tell her the truth and lose everything.
But none of that matters right now.
Not when she’s breaking apart on our kitchen floor.
I don’t think. I just move, defaulting to the only role I actually know how to play when shit gets real—being the calm for someone else’s storm. It’s what I do for Chloe during her bad nights and what I’ve done for my parents when the medical bills pile too high.
And now Maya needs me.
I don’t ask what’s wrong. Instead, I move with the quiet efficiency of someone who’s navigated plenty of crises. Glass from the cupboard. Water from the tap. The tissue box from the counter that she passive-aggressively labeled “For Maine’s Mess” during one of our petty domestic skirmishes.
God, that feels like a different universe now.
When I walk back to her, I don’t try to touch her—she’s too raw for that, too exposed—but instead, I kneel a few feet away and set the water and tissues on the floor beside her. Simple offerings of support and presence, with no strings and no expectations.
Then I lower myself to the floor across from her, and the kitchen becomes our own little bubble of grief. As I sit, close and silent, Maya cries with the kind of abandon that comes from finally, finally letting go of something you’ve been white-knuckling for too long.
I don’t know what broke her. Don’t know if it’s her family, those fuckers I know treat her like she’s defective, even though she won’t give me the details. Don’t know if it’s school, the pressure of her nursing program that has her studying until 3 a.m. most nights. Don’t know if it’s us, this thing we’re too scared to name.
