Page 91 of The Beautiful Collision
It’s a stark, mocking contrast to the emotional bomb site of my life.
I’m a refugee in my best friend’s home, a man without a place, haunted by the apocalyptic fight with Maya that plays on endless repeat in my head. The way she’d heard about the bet, the way she’d turned every rationale I had into a knife to the stomach, and the way she’d walked away.
But it’s not just the memory of her anger that echoes in my mind—though,fuck, the way she’d looked at me under that dying streetlight, like I was something she’d scrape off her shoe—but the quiet, devastating precision of her final argument that really does me in.
I quit my bet… You just kept playing.
That single fact draws a moral line in the sand I know I can’t cross back over. She chose authenticity the moment things got real, the moment it mattered. And then there’s me—trapped by a toxic cocktail of pride and panic and the goddamn pathological need to never be a burden—who clung to my lie like it was a life raft.
And it pulled us both under.
The shame of it is a physical weight, pressing me deep into the cushions, rendering me immobile and silent. My phone sits on the coffee table, dark and accusatory. There are twelve texts from Rook that I can’t bring myself to read because I know they’re either apologies or jokes, and I can’t handle either.
But there’s nothing from Maya, obviously.
Why would there be?
I’m the villain in her story now. The guy who weaponized her grief, who she thinks used her dead patient as a fucking tactical advantage in a game she didn’t even know she was playing. That’s not how I see it, because it all felt real to me, I just felt like I couldn’t say the words I needed to make it so.
Because of the bet.
But, Jesus Christ, when she put it like that…
The front door opens, and I don’t move. It’s Mike, back from practice. I can tell he’s tired, and I know from the group chat he’s been running extra drills to keep the team sharp, while I’m here rotting on his couch like the world’s most pathetic houseguest.
“Did you eat today?” he asks, and I can hear him moving into the kitchen, the refrigerator door opening.
“Not hungry,” I say, the first monosyllabic thing I’ve said since I woke up—with nobody to talk to and nobody I want to be.
Sure, there are classes (I’m cutting them) and hockey (I’m excused).
But I haven’t left this couch, except to go to the hospital, in three days.
“That wasn’t the question,” Mike says.
I don’t answer, which is answer enough. The refrigerator closes, and his footsteps approach, and I finally open my eyes to see him standing there with two beers, condensation already beading on the bottles. He doesn’t say anything else, just hands me one and settles into the armchair across from me.
The beer is cold against my palm, and I wait for the lecture or the attempt at a pick-me-up, but it doesn’t come. Mike doesn’t bring any of the judgment my performative self would usually deflect with a joke. Instead, he just waits, sipping his beer in unnerving, patient silence.
We’re there for at least five minutes, drinking our beers in silence. There are no questions, no demands for an explanation. Just Mike, the guy who’s seen me at my loudest and most obnoxious, sitting here witnessing my complete implosion without a word. And it’s that simple, unspoken offer of friendship, devoid of expectation or performance, that finally breaks the dam.
“I fucked up,” I say, the words coming out cracked and raw, like they’ve been scraped from the bottom of my throat.
Mike takes a slow pull from his beer. “Yeah.”
“No, I mean…” I sit up for the first time in hours, my body protesting the movement. “I really, monumentally, irreversibly fucked up.”
“Tell me.”
So I do. The confession erupts from me, a raw, unfiltered torrent of my failures. I tell him everything. About the way I couldn’t back down from the bet because backing down would mean admitting weakness. About the money, the real depth ofit, not just the vagueI’m brokehe already knew about but the actual numbers.
“Her rent was the only thing keeping my head above water,” I say, my voice hollow.
Mike’s jaw tightens, but he doesn’t interrupt, so I go on. I tell him about Chloe, about the suffocating fear that lives in my chest every time my mom calls. About sitting in that hospital room, deleting the text to Maya because I couldn’t—wouldn’t—add my crisis to hers. About being the easy kid, the one who never needs help, never asks for anything, and never becomes another problem to solve.
“And Maya…” Her name catches in my throat. “Fuck, Mike. She saw through all of it. The performance, the jokes, the whole Maine Show. She saw me. The real, broken, exhausted mess of me. And she didn’t run. She was right there, telling me she needed me, and waiting for me to say the same thing. But I fucked it up.”
The silence that follows feels endless. Mike’s expression moves through a painful spectrum—disappointment at the bet, dawning comprehension about the money, and finally, a profound, sickening guilt that makes him look away from me for a minute.
