Page 87 of The Beautiful Collision
All of it.
Every second.
She’s seeing it all through the lens of this moment, and I watch as the Maine she thought she knew—the broken, struggling, real man she’d started to trust—gets erased andreplaced with a monster who played with her heart for money and bragging rights.
It’s clear now.
She thinks I won the bet as soon as she said, “I need you…”
And she thinks I then discarded her.
She doesn’t scream or cry. She doesn’t ball her fists at her side and storm out. She doesn’t even march over to slap me or throw her drink in my face or any of the dramatic reactions you see in movies. But that’s cold comfort, because her reaction is so much worse.
After that endless second of holding my gaze, her face goes completely blank. Not the careful construction of her party-girl mask, but something deeper and more final. It’s like watching someone pull down metal shutters over a shop window.
Closed for business.
Permanently.
If I’d distanced myself from her because I didn’t want to hurt her, then mission failed, because she turns her back on me with a deliberation that feels like a physical blow. She doesn’t run, she simply walks to the door with her spine straight and her head high.
The door closes behind her with a soft click that somehow echoes louder than any slam could have. She’s left Generic Guy standing there confused, and her friends calling after her, and me sitting at this table with my life in ruins around me.
The Party Queen has left the building.
The bar slowly comes back to life around me, but it’s different now. I can feel every eye on me, the weight of their stares like physical pressure. Someone whistles, low and uncomfortable. Rook is still standing there, his grin finally faltering as his drunk brain processes that something has gone very, very wrong.
Mike’s hand lands on my shoulder, heavy and grounding. “Maine?—“
But I’m already moving, shoving off his attention and pushing back from the table so hard my chair tips over with a crash. The beer bottle I never drank falls, spreading foam across the sticky floor, but I leave it behind because I have to fix this.
I have to explain.
I have to?—
What?
Tell her it started as a bet but became real? Tell her that making her fall for me was supposed to be a game but I fell harder? Tell her that every moment after that first night was genuine and that the bet became meaningless the second she let me see who she really was?
It all sounds like bullshit, even in my head.
I make it three steps before Mike’s hand closes around my arm, stronger now.
“Let her go,” he says quietly, and there’s something in his voice that tells me he knows more than he’s been letting on. “Not tonight. Not like this.”
He’s right. Chasing after her now with desperation in my eyes would only worsen it. But every instinct screams at me to run after her, to drop to my knees in the parking lot and beg her to listen, to understand, to forgive what can’t be forgiven.
The bar spins around me, voices and laughter and music blending into a nauseating cacophony. Someone—Schmidt, maybe—is explaining to Rook what he’s done, and I can see the horror dawning on his face as sobriety hits him like a bucket of ice water.
But I don’t care about that. I don’t care about anything except the image burned into my retinas: Maya’s face in that moment of revelation, the exact second I went from being someone she trusted to someone who betrayed her in the cruelest possible way.
“You need to sit down,” Mike says firmly, but not unkindly. “You need to breathe. And you need to think carefully about what you do next.”
But I can’t sit. I can’t breathe. I can’t think.
Because I know that I’ve probably just lost the only person who ever lovedme,not the Maine Show. The person who saw I needed help and gave it to me. And the worst part—the part that’s going to haunt me forever—is that I did it to myself, because the bet and the lies were my choice.
And now all I can do is chase her and hope.
