Chapter 31
thirty-one
MAINE
I shouldn’t be here.
O’Neil’s feels like a movie set of my old life, all the familiar pieces in place but none of them real. The sticky floor, the crack of pool balls from the back tables, the neon beer signs casting their gaudy glow over everything—it all belongs to a version of me who doesn’t exist anymore.
That guy, the one who stood on chairs and orchestrated drinking contests, who turned every gathering into his personal circus, feels like someone I read about in a book once, a campus legend they’ll multiply ten times and be talking about for years to come.
Long after I’m gone.
The last week has blurred into a single, endless nightmare of beeping monitors and fluorescent lights that never turn off. Chloe’s blood oxygen readings are branded into my brain—eighty-eight, eighty-nine, eighty-seven, back to eighty-eight—numbers that dance behind my eyelids every time I blink.
Yet here I am, beer bottle on the table, untouched for the twenty minutes I’ve been sitting here. Mike and the guys staged what they called an intervention, physically dragging me out of the hospital room where I’d been sitting, waiting for the news that my sister was getting better or?—
I can’t finish that thought.
“You need to get out,” Mike had said, his tone leaving no room for argument. “Just one beer. One hour. The hospital will call if anything changes.”
I was going to refuse, but my parents had told me to go. So here I am, while my mind stays trapped in that ICU room, thinking of the little girl who’s struggling to breathe. The new medication isn’t working, and the inflammation in her lungs isn’t responding.
The doctors use words like “considering other options” and “monitoring closely,” which seems to be medical speak for “we don’t know what the fuck to do.” But it’s for that reason that I want to be there, holding up my sister and my parents, because at least then I know what to do.
It’s the one thing I still feel confident about.
Not hockey.
Not Maya.
Not my financial future, that’s for fucking sure.
So one beer, then I’m gone.
Doesn’t mean that one beer can’t be excruciating, though, as the bar noise washes over me in waves—laughter that feels obscene, music that grates, and the cheerful clink of glasses that makes me want to scream.
I’m drowning in the normalcy of it all while my sister fights to breathe forty miles away.
Mike’s voice cuts through the fog. “You haven’t touched your beer.”
I force myself to take a performative sip. “I should go back,” I say.
“You being there, exhausted and wrecked, doesn’t help her.”
I know he’s right, but logic doesn’t apply when your baby sister—the one you taught to tie her shoes, the one who used to crawl into your bed during thunderstorms—is lying in a hospital bed looking smaller than she ever has before.
The guilt is a physical thing, sitting on my chest like a weight. Not just about Chloe, though that’s the sharpest edge of it. It’s everything I’m not telling the guys around this table. They—and Coach—think I’m just worried about my sister, and that’s why my hockey has gone to shit.
Coach even gave me a fortnight off.
A blessed break from the public eye and, maybe, a chance to salvage my career.
Because nothing says “NHL prospect” like melting down in front of scouts.
But they don’t know about everything else. The empty refrigerator at home, the second job I had to take to send money to my parents for medical bills, the crushing weight of trying to be everything to everyone while slowly disappearing myself. And they sure as hell don’t know about Maya.
Maya.
Her name is a bruise I keep pressing, unable to stop even though it hurts.
And, because the universe is an asshole, the front door opens, letting in a gust of cold air that cuts through the bar’s stuffy warmth.
I don’t look up. I haven’t looked up for the last five people who’ve walked in.
But something in the atmosphere shifts, a charge in the air that makes my skin prickle with awareness.
I know it’s her before I even raise my eyes.
She’s here.
But when I do look up, I see it’s not the Maya I’ve been seeing in my apartment for the past two months. This is the Maya from before—the untouchable party queen, the wild stallion everyone whispers about—with her armor on, all sharp edges and brilliant smiles that don’t reach her eyes.
She’s with some guy I don’t recognize, tall and generic in that way that makes him forgettable even while you’re looking at him. She’s leaning into him, laughing at something he’s saying, her hand on his arm in that casual-but-not way that’s designed to stake a claim.
The performance is flawless.
Except I know her now. I know what she looks like when the mask comes off.
And underneath all that bright confidence, I can see the cracks. Her laugh is too loud, pitched just a little too high. There are shadows under her eyes that her concealer can’t quite hide, a tightness around her mouth that speaks of exhaustion held barely at bay.
She looks tired. Wound tight as a spring. Fragile.
And it’s my fault.
But she’s still so fucking beautiful it hurts to look at her.
I try to shrink into my seat, to become invisible the way I used to as a kid when my parents were arguing about medical bills. If I can just stay small enough, quiet enough, maybe she won’t see me, and maybe I can spare us both this collision.
But the universe has other plans.
“Hey, Hamilton!”
Rook’s voice booms across the bar like a foghorn.
His face flushed with bad booze and good cheer, completely oblivious to the grenade he’s about to throw into the room.
He pushes himself up from his stool at the bar, that wide, stupid grin spreading across his face like he’s about to do everyone a favor.
No, no, no?—
“There she is!” He cups his hands around his mouth like he’s calling plays from the goal. “Are you going to win the bet or what? Did she say the magic words yet?”
The world stops.
I mean that literally.
Everything just… stops.
The music might still be playing, people might still be talking at other tables, but the entire bar goes silent in my perception, every head turning in slow-motion—first to Rook, drunk and grinning and utterly unaware of what he’s just done, then to our table where I sit frozen, and finally, inevitably, to Maya.
I watch it happen in real-time.
First, confusion. Her perfectly painted lips part slightly, that bright smile that I’d fallen in love with freezing in place like someone hit pause on a video of her. Her eyes scan the room, finding Rook, then following his gesture to our table, to me.
Then comprehension. I see the exact moment the words land— bet , win , magic words . Her eyes widen, the color draining from her face so fast I’m afraid she might faint. The hand on Generic Guy’s arm goes slack, falling to her side like a dead thing.
But it’s the betrayal that kills me.
Because in that endless, horrible moment when our eyes meet across the bar, I watch her rewrite our entire history. Every tender moment, every vulnerable confession, every time I held her while she cried or laughed or came apart in my arms—I watch it all transform in her mind.
The blanket I draped over her.
The lasagna she heated for me.
The night on the kitchen floor when she crawled into my arms.
The way our bodies had conversations our mouths couldn’t manage.
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 and replaced 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 loved me, 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.