Chapter 30
thirty
MAYA
The shot of tequila burns a familiar path down my throat, a clean, sharp fire that momentarily silences the chaos in my mind. I slam the salt-rimmed glass down on the sticky bar top with a satisfying crack that makes the bartender glance over.
I immediately flag him down for another round, ignoring the slight raise of his eyebrow. He’s seen me here before, knows I can handle my liquor, but tonight there’s something different in his assessment. Maybe it’s the way my hand trembles slightly as I reach for my wallet.
Or maybe it’s the fact that I’m drinking tequila like the world is ending.
Which, in a way, it is.
“Maya, we have clinicals at seven tomorrow morning,” Sophie says beside me, her voice pitched high with that particular brand of concern she gets when she thinks I’m spiraling. “Dr. Rubinez is doing rounds, and you know how he gets when?—“
I tune her out, the words becoming white noise against the pounding bass that vibrates through the floorboards and up into my chest. Instead, I plaster on my most dazzling smile—the one that says I’m having the time of my life and you’re lucky to witness it —and turn my attention two stools down.
The guy sitting there has been watching me since we walked in. He’s wearing a too-tight Henley that shows off gym-sculpted arms and has that particular brand of confidence that comes from having never been turned down. Dark hair, decent jawline, generically handsome…
He’s attractive enough to scratch an itch and forgettable enough to walk away from without looking back. So, decision made, I give him a slow, deliberate smirk, the kind that says I see you looking and I like what I see . His eyes widen slightly, surprised and thrilled in equal measure.
Perfect.
A convenient, breathing shield against my thoughts.
Because if I let myself think, I’ll have to confront what has happened.
But the shield is full of holes, because my mind isn’t here at the club. It’s back in our apartment, replaying the last week on an endless, torturous loop. The way Maine barely looks at me anymore, his eyes sliding past me like I’m furniture. The careful distance he maintains in our shared spaces.
He saw you, my mind whispers through the crack in the shield, in a voice that sounds like my mother’s. He held you while you fell apart on the kitchen floor, and now he regrets it. He has seen behind your mask, seen the pathetic, needy thing you really are, and he wants nothing to do with it.
The thought is poison, burning through my veins worse than any amount of tequila ever could. It confirms everything I’ve always believed about myself, everything my family conditioned me to expect. That my authentic self is fundamentally unlovable, an emotional and social write-off.
This is why I cut my family off—to escape that feeling of being perpetually auditioned for love and always falling short— but now it’s on replay with Maine. Like with my family, he saw past the performance to the chaotic, messy center and decided to withdraw his affection with surgical precision.
So, no more.
The show must go on, but nobody gets to see behind the curtain.
“Maya!” Sophie’s voice cuts through my spiral, sharp and insistent now. Her hand is on my arm. “Are you even listening to me? I’m worried?—“
But I can’t deal with it.
Can’t deal with her concern or her pity or her knowing looks.
“I’m great, I’m out, I’m having fun, and I’m being exactly who everyone expects me to be.
So why don’t you and the worry committee”—I gesture dismissively at our friends, who are watching with varying degrees of concern and discomfort—“head home, because I’m going to stay here and do what I do best.”
“Which is what, exactly?” Sophie asks quietly. “Drink yourself stupid and go home with some random guy who doesn’t know your last name?”
The words hit me like a slap. Because yes, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.
It’s what I always do when things get too real, too messy, too much like actual feelings. I’m going to take control the only way I know how—by choosing to be reckless, by deciding to be wild, by orchestrating my own spectacular failure before anyone else can reject me.
And fuck her for judging me.
“If you don’t like watching, then don’t,” I say with a sweetness that could rot teeth, “we don’t all get to live the fairytale like you and Mike, Sophie.”
Sophie’s face crumples slightly, the hurt clear, and I know I’ve gone too far. But it’s too late. She knows this version of me—the one who burns bridges when she’s scared, who pushes people away before they can leave—though it’s never been directed at her before.
“Fine,” she says quietly, gathering her purse. “But when you wake up tomorrow feeling like shit, remember that you had people who cared enough to try.”
A moment later, they’re all gone, a collective wave of worried glances and whispered conversations trailing in their wake. The club suddenly feels colder, louder, and lonelier. The space where all my friends had been sitting just a moment ago gapes like a wound.
One of many.
Before I can think too much about it, I take another shot and pivot on my stool to face Henley Guy. He’s been watching the whole exchange with the expression of a lion who’s just watched the rest of the pack leave the weakest gazelle behind, and I know exactly what he’s thinking.
He thinks he’s about to make his move. I can see it in the way he’s already adjusting his posture, preparing his opening line, probably something about buying me a drink or asking if I’m OK. A mix of fake concern and additional liquor to make sure he gets me to bed.
He thinks he’s the one in charge here.
Idiot.
“You’re not just going to stare all night, are you?” I say, my voice pitched low and challenging.
Before he can formulate an answer—I can actually see his brain short-circuiting as he tries to catch up to me taking charge—I slide off my stool and take his hand, noting absently that his palm is slightly sweaty, and pull him toward the dance floor.
The dance floor is a writhing mass of bodies and hormones and desperation. The air is thick with the competing scents of cologne, perfume, and sweat, while the bass from the speakers is so loud I can feel it in my bones, rattling my ribcage like it’s trying to shake something loose.
Good.
Maybe it’ll shake the weight of Maine’s rejection off me.
The moment we find a pocket of space—really just a few square feet of sticky floor—I am a storm of motion. My body moves in a grinding rhythm against his, but it’s not seduction driving me. It’s a frantic need to exhaust the anxiety from my limbs, to burn off the energy of loneliness and despair.
My hands are on his shoulders first, using them as leverage to press closer. Then they slide down to his hips, guiding and controlling, showing him exactly how I want him to move. When he tries to take the lead, to spin me around or pull me against him his way, I resist, keeping control.
I dictate the energy, the rhythm, the distance, and the entire interaction. I pull him closer when I want the friction and push him away when he gets too comfortable, a chaotic push-pull designed to keep him off-balance and me in command.
And through it all, he thinks he’s hit the jackpot.
I can see it in his smug, slack-jawed expression, the way his hands get bolder, sliding from my waist toward my ass. He sees the performance—the wild girl grinding against him, the one who dragged him onto the dance floor, the one who’s clearly down for whatever—and mistakes it for genuine desire.
If only he knew that I can barely feel his hands on me. That my body is moving on autopilot. That every press of his hips against mine just reminds me of another body, one that fit against me perfectly, one that knew exactly how to move with me without my having to guide every motion.
Maine. Always fucking Maine.
Even here, even in the middle of my desperate attempt to forget him, he invades. The guy’s cologne makes me think of Maine’s simpler scent. The way this stranger’s hands grip my hips possessively makes me remember Maine’s gentler touch, how he held me like something precious.
Stop thinking about him!
I force myself to focus on the present. On Henley Guy, whose name I haven’t bothered to learn and definitely won’t remember in the morning. He isn’t my type—I can tell that already—because he’s not smart enough, not witty enough, and not quick enough.
Not… Maine enough.
But he’s here .
And he wants me.
Needs me.
He’s breathing and warm and letting me call the shots. His body is solid against mine, real in a way that my memories aren’t. And right now, the loneliness is a gnawing, cavernous thing inside me, so vast and deep I’m afraid I might fall into it and never climb back out.
For a moment, I think this might work.
Maybe the burn of his skin against mine, the friction of a stranger’s body under my command, could cauterize the wound for a few hours. Maybe if I take him home—no, not home, Maine might be there, so his place—I might cure myself with the hollow satisfaction of making someone want me.
Maybe I can fuck Maine Hamilton out of my system.
But as I grind my hips against him, as his hands get more insistent and his breath comes hotter against my neck, my stomach rebels. It’s not just the tequila, though that’s certainly not helping. It’s the sudden, violent understanding that this isn’t going to work.
That no amount of strangers’ hands on my body is going to erase the memory of the one pair of hands I actually want, but whose owner rejected me.
The nausea hits like a tidal wave and my control, the thing I pride myself on most, shatters like glass. I spin away from him without a word, leaving him standing there with his arms still held in the shape of my body, and rush through the crowd to the bathroom.
I barely make it.
The stall door bangs against the wall as I fall to my knees, and then everything I’ve drunk tonight comes up in violent, humiliating waves. The toilet bowl is disgusting—God knows when it was last properly cleaned—but I’m past caring. My body convulses, expelling the tequila and the pain.
I’m sobbing between retches, great, ugly sobs that echo off the bathroom walls. My carefully applied makeup is running in black rivers down my cheeks. My hair, which I spent an hour styling into waves, is now hanging in limp strands, threatening to fall into the toilet.
And that’s when the thought hits me, sharp and brutal in its clarity: There’s no one here to hold my hair.
Such a simple thing. Such a basic act of care. Sophie would have done it if I hadn’t driven her away with my cruelty. Maine would have, just like he took care of me that night on the kitchen floor. About how he saw me at my absolute worst and still looked at me like I was something precious.
Until he didn’t.
Until he pulled away and left me wondering what I’d done wrong, what part of my authentic self was so repulsive that he couldn’t stand to be in the same room with me anymore. So now, I’m utterly, completely alone in my mess. As I’ve always been.
As I was probably always meant to be.
When the heaving finally stops, I struggle to my feet, using the questionably clean stall walls for support.
My legs feel like water, my head spinning from dehydration and despair in equal measure.
I stumble to the sink, avoiding my reflection in the mirror, because I don’t need to see to know it’s bad.
I rinse my mouth, my hands are shaking as I try to clean the mascara from under my eyes, but it’s a lost cause. I look exactly like what I am: a disaster. And a shitty situation is made even better when the bathroom door opens and two girls stumble in, giggling and holding each other up.
They take one look at me, and their laughter dies.
“Oh, babe,” one of them says, her voice full of the kind of pity I’ve been running from all night. “Rough night?”
I can’t even answer. Can’t summon the energy for a lie or a deflection or my usual armor of sharp words. I just push past them and back into the bar, where the thumping bass that felt energizing an hour ago just feels totally nauseating now.
Instead of heading back to the bar or the dance floor, I collapse into a deserted booth in the corner.
The worn seat is sticky against my cheek as I curl onto my side, pulling my knees up to my chest. And it’s clear, now, that the show’s over, and all that’s left is a drunk, sad girl in a dirty booth, crying tears that won’t stop.
I close my eyes, and the grimy, spinning darkness of the bar gives way to an even deeper, more absolute black. The last thing I think before unconsciousness claims me is that somewhere, maybe at the apartment, Maine is suffering just as much as I am.
And we’re both doing it alone.
Because that’s what people like us do. We perform and pretend and push everyone away, and then we wonder why we’re drowning with no one to throw us a rope. And, the one time the two stars of their own show did forge a connection, it broke within seconds.
The darkness swallows me whole, and for once, I don’t fight it.