Chapter 22
twenty-two
The key turning in the lock feels like a small victory tonight.
For once, my wallet isn’t crying, and the shared tips pool from Pizza Plus actually made the shift worth the grease burns. Hell, I might even be able to buy name-brand cereal next week instead of the knockoff shit that tastes like cardboard soaked in sugar water.
But my positive mood dies instantly when I hear it.
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 not together , 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.
I don’t need to know.
That’s not what this is about.
This is about being what she was for me that night after Chloe’s visit, when I was broken on the floor and she somehow knew exactly what I needed. Not solutions, not platitudes, just… presence. And maybe a party that neither of us could afford but somehow made everything bearable for a few hours.
But I don’t think a party can solve this.
Eventually, there’s a gradual slowing of her sobs, the way they shift from body-shaking waves to shuddering gasps to exhausted, hiccupping breaths. She doesn’t look at me the whole time—doesn’t even acknowledge I’m there—but I stay anyway as she starts to get back under control.
I expect her to pull herself together now. To rebuild those walls brick by brick, to stand up and pretend this never happened. To retreat to her room and emerge tomorrow with her armor fully restored and some cutting remark about how I could have at least given her some bottled water.
Instead, she looks up at me.
And fuck me, she looks wrecked.
Her eyes are swollen almost shut, red-rimmed and raw.
Mascara has flowed in black rivers down her cheeks, mixing with the tears to create an abstract painting of grief on her beautiful face.
Her nose is red and running, and there’s definitely some snot that she doesn’t even seem to notice or care about.
“You know,” she says, and her voice is destroyed, hoarse and thick with tears, “when you were slumped against the door like this, I flashed my tits to get us enough booze to have a party and make you feel better, and all I get is tissues and a glass of water?”
The words are so unexpected, so perfectly Maya even in the midst of her breakdown, that I can’t help it—I bark out a laugh that’s probably too loud for the moment. She shakes her head in mock contempt, a watery attempt at her usual smirk pulling at her lips.
And then she’s laughing too. It’s that broken, hysterical kind of laughter that happens when you’re so emotionally wrung-out that your body doesn’t know what else to do. She’s sob-laughing, these hiccupping sounds that are equal parts humor and heartbreak.
Then she moves.
Not standing up, not pulling herself together with that supernatural composure she usually manages. She just… crawls. Literally crawls across the cold kitchen tiles that separate us, closing the distance with a vulnerability that takes my breath away.
She doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t need to. She just collapses against my side like her strings have been cut, burying her face in the crook of my neck. I can feel her tears soaking through my Pizza Plus shirt—the one that smells like garlic, although she doesn’t seem to care.
My arm comes up without conscious thought, wrapping around her shoulders, pulling her closer. She’s trembling, these little aftershocks of emotion rippling through her body. I can feel every shudder, every hitched breath, every moment of her complete and total surrender.
Her body fits against mine. Even broken, even falling apart, she fits.
I rest my chin on top of her head, breathing in the scent of her, and then she shifts slightly, pressing closer to me, and her hand comes up to grip my shirt like she’s afraid I might disappear. Like I’m her anchor in whatever storm she’s weathering.
Her fingers tighten in my shirt, and I feel her lips move against my neck.
For a second I think she’s going to say something, maybe even the words that would blow the top off the bet and my lies.
But she doesn’t. She just breathes, these deep, shaky breaths, like she’s trying to remember how her lungs work.
I want to tell her everything. About the bet, about how I’m in love with her, about how every moment of our whatever-this-is has been both the best and worst thing that’s ever happened to me.
I want to confess that I see her—really see her—past all the walls and shields and performances. That I know she’s scared and hurt and trying so fucking hard to be perfect in a world that keeps telling her she’s not enough.
But I don’t say any of that. Because right now, she doesn’t need my confession. She doesn’t need my drama or my guilt or my own fucking problems. She needs exactly what she gave me—presence without judgment, support without strings.
So I just hold her tighter and kick that can down the road again.
Knowing that with each kick, the ultimate consequences only grow.