Chapter 32
thirty-two
MAYA
The night air hits me like a slap of sobriety, shocking the warmth of the bar from my skin. The cold should feel cleansing, but instead it just makes everything sharper—the ache in my chest, the humiliation burning in my cheeks, the way my hands shake as I hold my phone.
This isn’t like the other night when I passed out at that club, drunk and pathetic, like some cliché of a broken girl. No, tonight, the few drinks in my system have been incinerated by something far more potent: pure, crystalline rage that leaves my mind terrifyingly clear.
A bet.
The words keep echoing in my head, Rook’s drunken voice on repeat.
Did she say the magic words yet?
Like I’m some achievement to unlock in a video game. Like everything we shared—every vulnerable moment, every time I let my guard down—was just him grinding for experience points. For a second, I think back to my bet with the girls, and my mind tries to rationalize it and hold onto hope.
But no .
Fuck that .
The minute it became real, I dropped my bet, but it looks like Maine kept on going. And as soon as I said ‘I need you’ he considered it mission accomplished, and he went back to being the sullen asshole he’d been when I’d moved in, when we’d been fighting over dirty dishes and laundry.
My phone buzzes in my hand, and Sophie’s face lights up the screen.
I stare at it for a moment and consider letting it go to voicemail, but even in my rage I know I can’t be a bitch to her again.
I upset her at the club and then landed on my face.
We’ve made up since, but screening a call from her wouldn’t be great.
So I answer.
“Yeah?” I say, trying to fight the tremble in my voice.
“Maya, what happened? I saw you leave and?—“
“I’m fine,” I cut her off, my voice coming out clipped and cold. “I’m going home.”
“But—“
“Sophie, I said I’m fine,” I sigh. “Please, I just need space.”
I end the call before she can deploy her particular brand of gentle persistence. This time, I don’t want comfort. I don’t want someone to hold my hair back while I cry and vomit. I want to rage. I want to scream. I want to find his fucking hockey stick and snap it in half.
I want to cut him off—cut him out—like I have my family.
Heavy footsteps pound on the pavement behind me, and I don’t need to turn around to know it’s him. I can feel his presence like a change in barometric pressure. God, I hate that my body still responds to his proximity with that familiar feeling in my stomach.
“Maya!” His voice cracks on my name. “Just let me explain.”
I don’t stop walking. Because fuck him. Let him chase me. Let him feel what it’s like to reach for something that keeps slipping away. Like when I’d waited for him to come home, ready to offer my heart, and he’d walked right by me without even a glance in my direction.
“Maya, fuck, please just—would you stop for one second?”
I reach the relative isolation of a streetlight a block from O’Neil’s, its orange glow sputtering like it’s having its own crisis. Fine. If he wants to do this, we’ll do this. I turn around and wait, a statue carved from ice and fury, as he skids to a halt in front of me.
He looks wrecked. Hair sticking up in all directions from where he’s been running his hands through it, chest heaving, those gray eyes wide and desperate. Good. I want him to hurt. I want him to feel even a fraction of what I’m feeling right now.
“I can explain,” he starts, the words tumbling out in a desperate rush. “The bet—fuck, it sounds so bad, but it wasn’t—I mean, it started that way, but?—“
He’s scrambling, and it would be pathetic if it weren’t so insulting.
“When you first moved in, Rook was giving me shit about you getting in my head, and I just—“ he runs his hand through his hair. “—I guess my pride was stung. I couldn’t back down. You know how they are, how I am with them. It’s all just stupid bravado and?—“
“So you bet you could, what, fuck me?” I scoff. “You ticked that box easily enough, money in your pocket, but you didn’t have to string me along after that…”
“No, Maya, fuck…” He sighs. “It wasn’t about the money…
winning it, I mean. But I couldn’t afford to lose once I made the bet,” he continues, like that explains everything.
“I was drowning, Maya. The rent, Chloe’s medical bills—I was working two jobs, and it still wasn’t enough. God, I’m such an idiot.”
I let him stumble through his excuses, each word digging the hole deeper. My silence is a weapon, sharp and unforgiving, and I wield it with the precision of a surgeon. Because, quite frankly, I just don’t give a fuck about anything that’s coming out of his mouth right now.
He hurt me the night he played the shitty game.
But tonight?
This is utter emotional apocalypse.
He’s still talking, still yammering on, but I’ve stopped listening. Eventually, he trails off, finally registering that I haven’t moved, haven’t spoken, and haven’t given him even the smallest indication that his words are landing anywhere apart from the cold pavement between us.
When he finally runs out of steam, when the last desperate syllable dies in the frigid air, I begin my systematic dismantling of Maine Hamilton. Because if there’s one thing that might make me feel less shitty right now and fast-track cutting him out of my life, it’s this .
“So.” My voice is dangerously calm, the eye of a hurricane. “Let me make sure I understand this correctly.”
He flinches at my tone, and I file that small victory away.
“That night you covered me with Chloe’s blanket—the one your grandmother made, the sacred family heirloom—that was what? Extra credit? Bonus points? Because if it was about fucking me, you could have cashed out weeks earlier, ticked that box and moved on…”
“Maya, no—“ His face crumbles. “The bet wasn’t that , it was about getting you to admit you had feelings, that’s why?—“
I knew that, but I was waiting for him to walk into my trap.
“Oh, it makes sense now. So when you sat with me on the kitchen floor after that little boy died.” My voice cracks slightly on that, but I push through.
“When I was sobbing about losing a patient, at my absolute lowest, you finally figured it out…”
“It wasn’t like that!” The words explode out of him. “None of that was about the bet. By then, I was already?—“
“Already what?” I scoff. “Already feeling guilty about playing me? Or had you already figured out that the easiest way to make someone fall for you is to weaponize their trauma? To be there at their most vulnerable moment and play the hero?”
He looks like I’ve physically struck him, reeling back from the truth of how it looks, how it all looks now through this new lens.
“Chloe’s in the hospital,” he says suddenly, desperately, like this explains everything. “She’s in the ICU. Her lungs—they’re not responding to treatment, and I’ve been there for days, and I couldn’t—I couldn’t tell you because telling you would mean?—“
“Would mean what?” I cut him off, my voice rising for the first time. “Would mean being honest? Would mean treating me like an actual person instead of a mark in your con game? I’m sorry about your sister, Maine, and I hope she’s OK, but do you understand how monumentally fucked up this is?”
“I couldn’t ask you for help or tell you I needed you!” He’s shouting now too, his control finally snapping. “Not when I was lying to you about the bet. Don’t you see how fucked up that would be? To lean on you, to let you comfort me, knowing what I’d done to you?”
“Oh, so you do have a conscience.” The sarcasm drips like acid. “Too bad it only kicked in after you’d already made me fall for you, then pushed me away. No, not pushed me away, actually, because that would require a reaction out of you of some kind.”
“Maya—“
“I came to your room that night,” I continue over the top of him, each word scraped raw from my throat. “I finally let someone in. Actually let them see me, all of me, not just the fun parts or the sexy parts but the messy, broken parts too. I said ‘I need you’ and I meant it.”
He makes a sound like I’ve gutted him, but I’m not done.
“And you shut me out the next day. Do you have any idea what that felt like? To finally trust someone, to be that vulnerable, right after I finally decided to cut off my family, and have them… reject me? I thought it was because you’d seen the real me and decided I was too much.
But it was worse. It was because you’d won. ”
He physically flinches at that, and part of me—the part that still stupidly, pathetically, utterly fucking infuriatingly cares about him—wants to take it back. But the bigger part, the part that’s been carved hollow by betrayal, twists the knife deeper.
“You want to know the really pathetic part?” My voice breaks completely now, the anger giving way to something rawer, more painful. “I saw you falling apart after that game. I saw you benched, humiliated, and I was ready to be there for you. All in. No games, no pretenses, just… us.”
He looks devastated, and he’s clearly out of words. All fight has drained out of him and he’s just standing there, a boxer on the ropes, taking every shot, waiting for the knockout punch. I could spare him, and I have to pause to swallow against the tears that want to fall, but I don’t hold back.
I won’t give him that mercy.
Not now.
Because this is how I say goodbye and reclaim myself.
“I had money for you,” I say quietly, and watch his face go slack with shock. “I’d withdrawn the last of my savings. I was going to help you with whatever was going on, because that’s what you do when you love someone. You help them. You don’t make it a transaction or a game or a fucking bet.”
The word ‘love’ hangs between us like a grenade with the pin pulled, and I can see the moment it detonates behind his eyes.
“But you,” I continue, my voice hardening again, “you couldn’t even let me do that or be honest about the bet. Because letting me help you get out of these problems would mean letting me in, and you’d rather implode than be vulnerable with someone.”
“No, I?—“
“Stop.” The word cracks like a whip. “Just stop. The bet itself? That could have been forgiven. We’re both competitive assholes, I get it. If you’d been honest, if you’d told me, we could have laughed about it and turned it into our weird meet-cute story.”
I see hope flicker in his eyes and I crush it immediately.
“But you didn’t. You kept lying. Every day, every night, every time you touched me knowing what this really was, you chose the lie.
And that makes you exactly like everyone else I’ve ever let get close to me.
Just another person who saw me as currency in a social game. My parents… my siblings… and now you.”
The silence stretches between us, broken only by the sputtering of the dying streetlight above us. And then, because I’m apparently a masochist who needs to twist the knife in both our wounds, I deliver the killing blow, sure he’ll see me as a hypocritical bitch, and needing him to.
“You want to know something funny?” I ask, my voice eerily calm again. “I had a bet too.”
His head snaps up, eyes wide with shock.
“Yeah,” I continue with a bitter smile. “My friends bet me I couldn’t make you fall for me by the end of the semester. Same stupid stakes, same stupid game.”
I watch his face crumble in the weak orange light, watch him process this new layer of deception. I let him try to figure out my angle, and whether this is a weird sort of mea culpa or an equalizing of the scales, and for a moment I feel a sick satisfaction.
Then I ram it home.
“But here’s the difference between us, Maine.” I meet his gaze steadily. “I quit my bet. The night after we slept together. Because my feelings were real, and I couldn’t—I wouldn’t—keep playing when it mattered. It wouldn’t have been fair to you.”
I take a step closer to him, close enough to see the tears he’s fighting back.
“You though?” I whisper. “You just kept playing. And that’s what makes you the bigger fool. Not because you made the bet, but because you couldn’t tell the difference between the game and what was real, and you might just have gambled away something pretty amazing.”
He stares at me, utterly defeated. His mouth opens and closes like he’s drowning on dry land, searching for words that don’t exist. There’s nothing he can say that will undo this. His betrayal—and my cruelty in response—is too great, and we both know it.
The last of my anger dissolves, leaving only a vast, empty coldness.
I’m so tired. Tired of performing, tired of protecting myself, tired of being disappointed by people I dare to trust. I just want to go home, except home is an apartment I share with him, and that thought is so absurd I almost laugh. I turn to leave.
“Wait.” His voice is wrecked, barely a whisper.
I hesitate, my back to him. Some pathetic part of me hopes he’ll say something that fixes this, some magic words that will rewrite the last ten minutes—hell, the last few weeks, from the minute he walked into the apartment and ignored me—but magic words are what got us here in the first place.
“Don’t go,” he says, and I can hear him take a shaky breath. “The apartment—it’s yours. This is my fault, so I’ll go stay with Mike or… somewhere. Just please don’t leave because of me. I don’t want to drive you out of a home on top of everything else.”
I don’t argue. I don’t have the energy to be magnanimous, to insist he stay in his apartment. My cold silence is answer enough. And, without looking back—because if I look back, I might break, might forgive, might do something supremely stupid like run into his arms—I walk away.
But even though I don’t look, my mind can paint a pretty good picture of Maine, standing alone under that sputtering streetlight, a fallen performer under a single, unforgiving spotlight. The image burns itself into my memory, and I know it’ll haunt me.
So I just walk. One foot in front of the other.
Away from him. Away from us.
Away from the best and worst thing that ever happened to me.