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 meanletting 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 thisreallywas, 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, andneedinghim 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.
thirty-three
MAINE
The couchin Mike’s apartment has become my island of self-loathing, a temporary refuge that feels more like a prison cell. Three days I’ve been here, staring at the ceiling, replaying every moment, every lie, every fucking chance I had to come clean and didn’t.
Every dirty, messy moment.
The contrast is ironic, because everything else here is clean and settled. Mike and Sophie have built something real in this space—framed photos on the mantle, a throw blanket casually draped over the armchair like it belongs there, and matching coffee mugs in the sink.