Page 66 of Close Your Eyes and Count to 10

Mav had already clocked her, was thinking about what he might say if he made his way over there. “Maybe she’s looking atyou,” he answered his friend, who blew out a breath. Gustavo was also quite hot and had no trouble with the ladies.

Mav recognized her, an influencer—mental health or some girl-power type thing. A competitor in the challenge. She’d done well—third, he thought. Some cash and prizes. She looked young, likereallyyoung. Was she legal? Must be: she held a pink drink in her hand.She whispered something to her friend, keeping her eyes on him.

“Nah. No one’s looking at me when you’re around,” Gustavo said without any hint of jealousy. They’d been friends too long, and guys just didn’t care about that shit. Gustavo was happy enough if the girl of the evening came with a gaggle of friends. Everyone in places like Aspen was a certain kind of hot, in shape, moneyed. To Mav and his boys, then, one girl was as good as any other for the night. That was before Angeline. That was before Maverick knew what it was like to have the love of a good, strong woman, love you had to earn.

Something happened when Mav locked eyes with Chloe that night; a kind of sizzling energy passed between them. And although she was hot AF, he felt that chill, the one he had right before the extra big fuckups that laid him up and forced him to take a hard, cold look at his ceiling and his life.

But at that stage, before Angeline, before she’d turned him on to yoga, meditation, and mindfulness—or tried to—he was not about following hisinner voice. He was all about following his…desires. In fact, at that point, he didn’t even realize there was another way to live. It was only aboutwantandget.

That night in Aspen, he made his way through the hard-bodied, well-heeled crowd over to Chloe, and it was like they already knew each other. Which was often the case, because when you were internet-famous, people always thought they knew you. Chloe was petite; he had to bend down to hear her. That smile, it told him everything he needed to know about himself, about her. Over the din, she said all the right things, how she was a fan, how she’d been inspired to enter the Tough Be-atch competitions as a way to combat her mental-health issues, because of him, because of Extreme. She reached up to touch the deep scar over his eye where his forehead had met the sharp edge of his metal wheel guard during a flail on his BMX in Germany.

“I was watching when you did this,” she said. “You walked it off like it was nothing.”

What the cameras didn’t see: Maverick puking in the trees. Passing out when they stitched him up in the med tent. The three days it took him to recover. The pain pills that left him foggy and not himself. How he felt himself disappearing into that Oxy cloud and liking it, and how if it hadn’t been for Hector taking the pills and sitting on him for a couple of days, he might have found himself hooked.

“It wasn’t nothing,” he surprised himself by admitting.

Her gaze was thoughtful, knowing.

“Are you ever going to slow down?” she’d asked. They’d found a quiet booth in the back of the bar. Her friend was dancing with Gustavo. “I don’t have the same followership as you do. And they’re not rabid fans like yours are. But it’s like a lot, isn’t it, every day? Living for your feed, your WeWatch channel?”

“I don’t know anything else,” he admitted. “I’ve never lived another way.”

Another thing he’d never said out loud. He’d taken too many gummies, obviously.

She nodded, ran a delicate finger around the rim of her glass. “The pressure gets to me sometimes. The highs and lows of it, the nastygrams in my DMs, the people you meet on the street who think they know you, for me all the girls in pain out there, writing to me for help with their depression, anxiety, eating disorders. Then when you go dark for whatever reason, you lose so many followers. And real life…”

She gazed around, and he recognized her expression, a kind of confused disappointment. Reality, the real world, it paled in comparison to the dizzying highs and crushing lows of a life lived online. Like sometimes, his online life seemed real, and reality seemed distant, inaccessible, frighteningly dull. The exhilaration of successes, the anger at detractors, the disappointment when a post failed, the money when you slayed, the roller coaster of it all was addictive.Later Angeline would teach him that there was only here, only now, only the breath. And he’d glimpse that, its essential truth. What he didn’t—couldn’t—tell Angeline was that it scared him to death.

Even now, Aspen far behind him, as he rushed toward the hotel on this tiny, nowhere island that didn’t have a single nightclub, he had the urge to go live, to broadcast to his followers about something, about anything, just to get the reactions, even the bad ones. Just to have theengagement, anything but the quiet, dark truth of the moment. He was alone.

His night with Chloe was, should have been, just another highly pleasant sexual encounter in a five-star hotel, followed by a decadent breakfast in bed, and then, of course, his hasty retreat.

“Hey, keep the room,” he told her. “I think we have it through the weekend.”

She nodded, looked down at her cuticles, and he could see she was upset that he was going. She felt something that he didn’t.

“I’m so sorry I have to jet,” he said, leaning in for a kiss. Then deep eye contact. “Can I see you again?”

He always asked that. It helped ease his escape, made him seem like less of a dick. She brightened a bit. They exchanged numbers. But the truth was, he had mostly forgotten her by the time he made it to the plane. Hector and Alex were already there waiting. They were on to the next thing. What had it been? Now, he couldn’t even remember.

Something about his encounter with Chloe stayed with him, though. A clinging unease, like he’d done something wrong. But he hadn’t, right? They were grown people who’d shared a night together, and that was it. He didn’t have to marry her. He didn’t even have to call. She texted him that night:

That was special for me. I don’t usually do things like that.

He ignored it. She kept texting.

I can still feel you on my skin.

Hey, I’ll be at the Tough Be-atch in Cabo. Meet up?

Okay, wow. R U ghosting me?

When she called the next day, he blocked her. But not before he saw her final text.

I’m not like other girls, Mav.

That turned out to be true.

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