Page 77 of The Beautiful Collision
The Uber is already waiting, and as I slide into the backseat, I catch my reflection in the window. The girl staring back at me is gorgeous, confident, completely in control. She’s also a stranger, but that’s fine, because apparently it’s better to be a beautiful stranger than an ugly truth.
My parents told me that for twenty-three years.
And Maine just confirmed it.
And tonight, I’m going to drown the memory of Maine Hamilton looking at me like I mattered, right before he remembered that I don’t.
act 3
twenty-eight
MAINE
The silencein our apartment has texture now. It’s thick and suffocating, like trying to breathe through wet wool or trying to swim fully clothed. Three days since the game, and we’ve become experts at existing in the same space without actually sharing it.
I pour coffee and quickly eat breakfast while she brushes her teeth. She grabs her keys from the bowl in the hallway while I’m in the shower. We orbit each other like binary stars that have lost their gravitational pull—close enough to feel the absence, far enough to pretend it doesn’t hurt.
Except itfuckinghurts.
Right now, she’s in the kitchen making breakfast, and I can hear every movement through my closed bedroom door. The clink of a spoon on her bowl. The soft pad of her bare feet on linoleum. Each sound is a reminder of what I’ve destroyed, what I’m still destroying with every minute I maintain this distance.
Just walk out there. Tell her the truth and you’re sorry. Tell her you need her.
But I can’t. The bet sits in my chest like a tumor, malignant and spreading. Every time I think about coming clean, I imagine her face when she finds out. The betrayal. The disgust.The confirmation that I’m just another person who saw her vulnerability and used it against her.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand. A message from Mike:
You coming to practice or what?
I check the time. Shit. I’m already twenty minutes late. I reply:
On my way.
It’s a lie. I’m sitting on my bed in yesterday’s sweats, and the thought of facing the team—of facing their questions about the bet, about Maya, about my spectacular failure on the ice—makes me want to throw my phone through the window.
And I’m also trapped in here until she goes.
Thankfully, a few minutes later, the apartment door clicks shut, Maya leaving for her clinical placement shift. I wait until I hear her footsteps fade down the hallway before I emerge from my room like some kind of pathetic vampire afraid of the light.
The kitchen still smells like her. Her coffee mug sits in the sink, lipstick print on the rim. Red today. The angry red she’s been wearing since I shut her out. I’ve caught myself looking—at her lips, at her ass, at all of her—since I shut her out, like a kid outside a candy store.
I know what I want, but I can’t have it.
I should go to practice. I should at least pretend I give a shit about hockey, about school, about anything other than the growing void in my chest. Instead, I grab a beer from the fridge—the breakfast of champions—and retreat to the couch.
The apartment feels wrong without her energy filling it. Even when we were at war over territory and passive-aggressive sticky notes, there was life here. Now it’s just empty space and the ghost of what we almost had, before I fucked it all up.
Some fucking mess you’ve made, Hamilton.
I drain the beer and grab another. It’s not even noon, but who’s counting?
The second beer goes down easier than the first, dulling the edges of my self-hatred just enough to function. So, when I finally drag myself to my room to change for practice, there’s some chance I might be able to get through the day without putting a fist through a wall.
My hockey bag sits in the corner, equipment spilling out like the guts of something dead. The sight of it makes my stomach turn. Hockey used to be my escape, the one thing I was genuinely good at. Now it’s just another reminder of my public humiliation, another arena where I’m failing.
As I pull on a semi-clean t-shirt, I catch my reflection in the mirror.
I look like shit.
