Chapter 7
seven
MAINE
Twenty-seven steps to my bed.
Twenty-seven steps before I can stop pretending I’m not completely fucked.
Not broke, like I was. But still just as fucked.
The door of my apartment screams on its hinges as I shoulder through, my body pickled in Pizza Plus’s signature cologne—garlic, cheese, pepperoni, and the particular reek of minimum wage—and my feet throbbing from eight hours of cooking pizzas.
The apartment air carries something pleasant and clean that makes my own stench bloom in my nostrils.
Maya’s candles burning again, or her diffuser, or her perfume…
the woman is basically a walking fragrance factory, and it’s no wonder she needs someone to help pay the rent with all the shit she spends cash on.
But that’s her problem, not mine, as long as she shoulders her half of the bills.
As I head inside, the living room is drowned in shadow except for light bleeding from Maya’s laptop screen on the dining table. Before Maya moved in, I’d pass out wherever gravity won. The apartment was the one place where Maine Hamilton, Comic Relief and Hockey Star, could finally power down.
Now it’s just another venue, and my toughest critic has a front-row seat.
I pry off my sneakers, because she’s established her position on wearing shoes indoors via progressive escalation: disapproving looks, pointed throat-clearing, and finally a hot-pink sticky note depicting what might have been either a frowny face or a biohazard symbol.
And that’s when I see her.
She returns from the kitchen, giving me the slightest nod of greeting, then sits at her laptop. My eyes track her the whole time, and my exhaustion suddenly burns away into a crystallized clarity. Even in her most relaxed state, doing coursework late at night, she’s sex on legs.
She’s wearing a tissue-thin gray tank top, complete with black bra straps slicing dark lines across pale shoulders. Her sleep shorts retreat further up her thighs with each micro-adjustment, giving me an eyeful. And her hair is twisted into messy chaos, stabbed through with a ballpoint pen.
My throat resembles desert conditions, and the sight shoots straight to my cock. And the worst part is she’s not even trying. This isn’t some dressed-to-the-nines party outfit with fuck-me heels and predatory lipstick. This is Maya studying at midnight, in low-power mode.
I realize I’ve been frozen inside the door and staring at her right as she glances up at me. Her gaze holds mine a beat past casual, past roommate acknowledgment, into territory that makes my chest tight. I bet she can see it all—the stress behind my bravado, the sizzling attraction I’m hiding.
Well, trying to hide.
“Big night at the office?” Her voice cuts cool across the distance, and there’s something under the sarcasm, something that notices I’m later than usual.
“Just living the dream.” The words come out rough. “One large pepperoni at a time.”
She gives me this little half-nod, already pivoting back to her screen, dismissing me as efficiently as she’d process a food delivery. The pen catches between her teeth as she puts it in her mouth, and I have to lock my jaw to keep from making a sound.
I retreat toward my room, the door swings wide, and then I see it.
Dead center on my pillow, positioned with pathological precision: the plate I’d abandoned in the sink this morning, now radiating aggressive cleanliness. The ceramic actually throws back light like an accusation, and a hot pink sticky note crowns it:
Did it get lost on its way home?
Anger floods my system, instant and pointless, because this is the latest in the back-and-forth micro-aggressions we’ve shared since she moved in. I’d tried to welcome her, cleaning her room and giving her the freedom to fill it—and the rest of the apartment—as she needed to to feel welcome.
But she keeps crossing the line.
She’s synchronized her marathon-length showers to my practice schedule with admirable precision.
She’s “optimized” the kitchen into some Nordic organizing system that probably requires certification.
She’s asserted dominance over the scent of the entire apartment, and now she’s working on the sight.
Her shit—decorative items, pot plants—is now fucking everywhere .
So I keep silently pushing her back over the line.
A hockey bag left here, a plate left in the sink there. It’s immature, but it’s the only possible rebellion in the cold war between us, because the fact is I can’t afford the war to go hot. Her rent splits the difference between survival and drowning.
The note crumples in my fist and energy buzzes through me—frustration and exhaustion and the phantom pressure of her gaze—and I need to burn it off before I do something stupid.
Something like storming back out there, telling her what those shorts are doing to me, and telling her to take her fucking candles…
And maybe asking if she’d like to fuck before she goes.
But I don’t do that, because I need her.
And if I confronted her, I might be tricked into admitting that I time my morning protein shake based on when she gets out of the shower and heads to make coffee.
Or that I feel like a giddy schoolboy when her guard drops and she almost smiles at my stupid jokes.
So instead, I’ll do what I always do when I’ve got energy to burn and no party to ringlead.
My work shirt hits the floor, stained with grease, and the pull-up bar lurks in my doorway like a constant dare.
At least it doesn’t leave passive-aggressive notes or make my apartment smell like promises I can’t afford.
I launch up, grip biting metal, and pull.
One. Two. Three.
My shoulders shriek immediately—a clean pain I understand.
Four. Five. Six.
Here’s what’s fucked: I’ve got a PhD in reading women. After three minutes of the Maine Hamilton Method, they’re usually laughing and sharing their numbers. But Maya’s built from different materials, which deflect my bullshit back on me and make me feel a bit stupid.
Seven. Eight. Nine.
But a few times, I’ve nailed it, a well-timed joke or a witty comeback. And when she laughs… well, I’m not going to say some cliché shit like ‘it’s like angels singing’, but when she actually laughs—not that surgical exhale but the real thing—it’s messy and beautiful.
Ten. Eleven. Twelve.
I hear her chair scrape against hardwood, but don’t think much of it, until I can literally smell her getting closer, the scent cutting through my post-shift marinade. She materializes in my peripheral vision, stopping just outside the threshold of my bedroom like she’s honoring vampire rules.
And then, she watches.
Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen.
I don’t say anything. Don’t even acknowledge she’s there. If she wants a show, then I’m happy to oblige with something that’s Marines-commercial perfect, hopefully giving her some of the frustration and attraction I’ve been feeling for days.
Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen.
“Peacocking for an audience of one, Hamilton?”
Her remark makes my overheating skin even more scorching, but I focus on keeping my form textbook—chest kisses bar, full extension, controlled descent. The last thing I need is for her to think she’s got me rattled, but as I try to load a comeback to her quip, I make a critical error.
I meet her eyes.
And there it is.
For half a heartbeat, maybe less, something else bleeds through her expression.
The smirk holds position but her eyes betray her, tracking down my chest with heat-seeking focus.
They pause at my abs, where sweat pools in the grooves, and linger at the V where my sweatpants barely cling to hip bones.
Then they snap back up, but not before I see what was in them.
Want.
Raw, unfiltered, rapidly buried want.
The revelation hits like a crosscheck to the lungs. Maya Hayes—the unmovable object to my unstoppable farce—just inventoried me like I’m on the menu. And, suddenly, what I thought was a one-way spark of attraction is now a two-way inferno.
That does it. My concentration shatters and my rhythm dissolves. My right palm, suddenly slick as black ice, loses purchase completely. Gravity claims me and I plummet—knees buckling, left hand scrambling for the doorframe to avoid a complete catastrophe, and my ass hits the floor.
She raises an eyebrow, her sense of victory clear in that knife-edged smile. “Really committed to that dismount,” she says. “Points for creativity.”
I open my mouth to give some smart-ass retort and recover my dignity, but I’ve got nothing. Maine Hamilton, who’s never met a silence he couldn’t fill or an ass he couldn’t outsmart, is sitting on his ass with sweat cooling into embarrassment and smelling like garlic.
“Yeah, well.” I push up to standing, trying to salvage dignity from this car wreck. “Gotta give the people what they want.”
It’s a weak-ass comeback, and we both know it.
“The people.” She tastes the words, lets them hang, her silence telling me what she thinks of my return of serve. “All one of me.”
She takes a step closer. The hallway contracts.
She has to tilt her face up to maintain eye contact—I’ve got thirteen inches on her—but somehow she’s still winning this altitude contest. I can smell her, and that damn bra-and-tank top combination is trying to pull my gaze down to her cleavage like a tractor beam.
God damn it.
I can’t even escape her in my bedroom.
“You missed a spot in your… enthusiastic… cleaning performance earlier,” she says. “There’s marinara splatter that’s five days old.”
One second she’s eye-fucking me, the next she’s critiquing my food sanitation. “Tomorrow,” I manage, my voice finding something close to steady. “Scout’s honor.”
“You were never a scout.” Another smirk. “Scouts have discipline. Follow-through. The ability to complete pull-ups without requiring medical attention.”
The flirty artillery lands right on target.
“Ouch.” I press a hand to my chest. “My fragile ego.”
“Nothing fragile about you.” She glances at my chest, then heads to her room.
Physics becomes my enemy as those shorts wage war on ass coverage with each step.
If it’s twenty-seven steps from the front door to my room, then the five she takes from my bedroom door to hers feels like the sexiest damn thing I’ve ever seen.
Then her door clicks shut with a finality that feels like punctuation.
I’m left breathing like I’ve run suicides, skin electric, air still drugged with her scent. My exhaustion has been burned away like a spark to a room full of gunpowder, and my cock shows definite investment in recent events, which is just spectacular considering I share a wall with the cause.
I grab the accusatory plate and head to the kitchen, where her laptop hibernates but her presence persists—a half-drained mug of tea positioned with mathematical precision, three highlighters arranged neatly, and a nursing textbook splayed open to whatever page she was on.
The setup screams do not disturb .
So naturally, I disturb, because I’m living with someone who treats passive aggression like a competitive sport.
She keeps score, and I’m losing, which is unacceptable.
Because if there’s one thing Maine Hamilton doesn’t do, it’s lose gracefully, and if there’s one thing he does do, it’s raise the stakes constantly.
It’s just a nudge. Nothing catastrophic, nothing that will disrupt her study or ruin her notes, because I’m not a complete asshole. But I do take great glee in swapping the lid of the green highlighter with the orange one, then rotating them just enough to break her perfect parallel arrangement.
And when I flip her bookmark three chapters ahead?
The petty satisfaction tastes better than a game-winning goal.
That done, I slap the plate into the cupboard, a smile on my face, replaying that look. That splinter of time when her control slipped and I glimpsed… what? The same inconvenient want that’s been eating through my walls since she invaded my space?
The possibility sits in my gut.
Because here’s the spectacular joke: I’m shackled.
Her rent money is my life support. And if this gets complicated beyond passive-aggressive back-and-forth…
Hell, when this gets complicated, because that look promised complications with compound interest, I can’t execute my usual exit strategy and ghost her.
I’m financially handcuffed to a woman who just made me forget my name with two seconds of unguarded attention.
But there’s more to her than that. I see the exhaustion she tries to hide, the fear she’s feeling since her parents cut her off (she hasn’t told me that, but Mike did…), and the unguarded moments that are cracks in her party girl, wild stallion facade.
And each crack in her perfection only makes her more compelling.
But that’s the problem. She isn’t just a roommate or a means to an end. She’s a force that has completely disrupted my equilibrium, and I have no idea how to get it back. And the scariest part is how much I want to see that hungry look from her again.
And how much I want to be the reason her control fractures.