Page 76 of The Beautiful Collision
And that somehow feels final.
Give him space, I tell myself.He’s processing. This isn’t about you.
But that’s the thing about wounds—they make everything about them, like broken bones that ache before the storm, impossible to ignore. And, right now, my particular wound is screaming that this is exactly about me and that he’s discarded me like everyone else.
He saw me at my most vulnerable.
Heard me open up.
And what he saw and heard wasn’t to his liking.
So now he’s shutting me out.
The thought makes me want to throw up.
Before I can talk myself out of it, I’m walking toward his door. My bare feet are silent on the hardwood, but my heart is so loud I’m sure he can hear it through the walls. I raise my hand to knock, then hesitate. What if I’m wrong? What if I’m about to make this so much worse?
But I need to know if the man I let see me—really see me—is about to do what everyone else in my life has done.
I knock. “Maine, are you OK?”
Silence.
It stretches between us, thick and suffocating. I can picture him on the other side of the door, probably sitting on his bed, trying to figure out how to handle the mess I’ve become. The high-maintenance disaster. The girl who was supposed to be fun and easy but turned out to be none of those things.
“I just need to be alone, Maya.”
Six words from the other side of the door are all it takes to confirm every fear instantly, every insecurity, every wound my parents carved into me with their conditional love and calculated rejection—wounds I’d overcome to tell Maine how I feel.
And worse than the words themselves is the tone of his voice. It’s flat, careful, and devoid of any warmth. It’s the voice of someone handling a situation. Managing a problem or creating distance from something—someone—they don’t want to deal with.
I step back from the door like it’s burned me. My hand goes to my stomach, pressing against the sick, hollow feeling that’s opened up there. I know this feeling. I’ve felt it before, every time my mother’s voice went cold on the phone, every time my father decided I wasn’t worth his attention, every time my siblings read my messages and chose silence over connection.
I showed him who I really am, and he doesn’t want it.
The thought is so clear, so obvious, that I almost laugh. Of course. I let my guard down for five minutes, showed him the scared, grieving, desperately lonely person under all the performance, and he’s running for the hills just like everyone does.
My phone is in my hand before I consciously decide to grab it. My thumbs fly across the screen, muscle memory taking over as I construct my armor piece by piece, covering over the blast crater that now resides where my heart was a minute ago. I type out a message:
Worst game ever. I need a drink. Girls’ night out, STAT.
The responses are immediate. Priya sends a string of cocktail emojis. Another friend suggests that new rooftop bar downtown. Sophie asks if I’m OK, but I ignore her concern and focus on the logistics: where we’re going and what to wear.
The cash I’d pulled from the ATM earlier—money I’d planned to slip into Maine’s wallet when he wasn’t looking, my own quiet way of taking care of him—will pay for tonight instead. Fuck him. Fuck his rejection. Fuck his pride and his walls and his sudden need for space.
If he wants the party girl, the fun one, the easy one, that’s exactly what he’ll get.
I grab a dress from my closet, the one that makes my ass look incredible and my tits look even better. My hands are shaking as I do my makeup, painting on the mask. Smoky eyes. Red lips. The face of a girl who doesn’t need anyone, who doesn’t break down, confess love, or make coffee for boys who won’t look at her.
As I slide on my heels, I hear his door open. I freeze, some pathetic part of me hoping he’s changed his mind, that he’s coming to say he’s sorry, that he just needed a minute but he’s OK now, we’re OK now. But his footsteps head toward the kitchen, not toward me.
Fridge opens, beer pops open, fridge closes.
Message received, loud and clear.
I grab my purse and head for the front door, making sure my heels click against the floor with each step. Because Iwanthim to hear me leaving. Iwanthim to know I have somewhere else to be, someone else to be, and maybe someone else to be with.
The Maya he met on the kitchen floor? She was a momentary glitch, a brief malfunction in the system. This Maya—the one in the fuck-me dress with the perfect smile and the empty heart—this is the only Maya he’s going to get from now on.
