Page 78 of The Bet
My hands shake so hard I have to grip the edge of the table to steady them. “I can’t,” I say. “Not like this. Please. Just let me explain?—”
He looks at me, and the force of it pins me to the spot. “I don’t want to hear it,” he says, his eyes flat and blue and endless. “I don’t want to see you again.”
I blink, and for a second, everything goes white. “You don’t mean that,” I whisper.
He does. I see it in his face. The same face that bent down and kissed me when I was half-drunk, that whispered secrets in the dark, that looked at me like I was a miracle when he thought I couldn’t see. That face is gone now. There’s just a wall of harshness and regret and wasted time.
He sets the whiskey glass down, wipes his hands on the front of his jeans as if to rid himself of the last trace of me, and walks to the window. The city is at his back now, a thousand little lives flickering behind him, none of them mine.
“Leave now.”
I pull myself up, somehow. The room spins, but I keep going. I gather my bag, my jacket, the broken pieces of my pride. I walk to the kitchen and set my key on the cold marble, the sound of it tiny but absolute.
For a second, I think about saying goodbye. I think about turning to look at him one last time, memorizing the breadth of his shoulders and the mess of his hair and the shape of his hands in the dim light. But I don’t.
I depart without a word.
The elevator is a tomb. The ride down is slow, endless, every floor a countdown to extinction. I see my reflection in the mirror above the buttons—eyes red, mouth chewed to rawness, hair wild—and I don’t even recognize her.
When the doors open on the lobby, I walk out into the blur of night, into the wind and the noise and the anonymity of the city. I keep going until I can’t feel my feet, until the cold is the only thing that keeps me upright.
Behind me, high up in the sky, Thomas is still standing in the window, the city lights blinking around him. The video is silent now, just another dead thing in the dark. But I know it’s still there, trapped in the phone, in the cloud, in the space between us.
I keep walking, and for the first time in a long time, I don’t look back.
The night is full of neon and blue and the kind of loneliness that never really ends.
But it’s mine.
And I deserve it.
Maybe I always did.
21
DID I COMPLETELY F*CK UP?
Thomas
Iget to the cafe first first, as always. I pick the table farthest from the window, where the morning light can’t glare me into submission. There’s a line of mismatched chairs, all of them scraped and beaten like rescue animals, and a chalkboard menu that’s been wiped and rewritten so many times it looks like a ransom note. I order a double espresso, then sit with my back to the wall, the way you do in places that remind you of childhood or failure. The persistent smell of dark roast is punched through by something yeasty and sweet—maybe the bread, maybe the pastry case, maybe just the memory of mornings before I started hating them.
I don’t have to wait long. My daughter arrives only ten minutes late, which is a miracle. She strolls in, so relaxed that it’s almost a joke. Stella’s wearing an old college crewneck, the neckline frayed enough to suggest she’s either broke or one of those hipster girls pretending to be poor. Her eyes scan the bistro—one, two, three, then me—and she weaves between tables with a cat’s certainty. She sits without greeting, drops her phone nextto the napkin, and folds her hands in her lap. When the waitress comes, she orders a flat white with oat milk, no pastry, and then raises an eyebrow to me.
“So is it as bad as you were saying?”
I reach into my pocket, pull out my own phone, and place it on the table, face up. No drama. I unlock it, open to the file, and hit pause on the first frame. I don’t bother with a preamble.
Stella’s eyes flicker. She knows exactly what she’s seeing because I told her over the phone: Andie, lush and nude, legs spread so wide her hips nearly lift off the bed, my cock buried in her, skin glistening with sweat. It’s not artful, not even a little; the angle is amateur, the audio a raw scramble of gasps and hoarse declarations. There’s no mistaking the faces, or the violence of the want. The video is paused at the second I bottom out, Andie’s mouth open in a scream, my hands braced on either side of her waist.
My jaw feels like it’s about to lock, but I make myself hold her gaze. “I turned down the volume because full volume would get us thrown out of this place. But yeah, I found this in Andie’s Google Drive,” I say. “She left her laptop with me. Needed a system update, apparently.”
Stella doesn’t blink. She takes in the phone, the video, then me. “Okay, so what do you want me to do? My dad and my apartment-mate are making amateur porn. Weird, but fine.”
I don’t dignify her comment. Instead, the words come out in a rush. “She never told me she filmed it. Never asked. Didn’t even mention it, not once, even when we had our—” I swallow, feel the grit in my throat, “—Come to Jesus talk. We swore no more secrets, and then this pops up.”
Stella makes a show of reaching for her cup. She hasn’t even touched it yet, but she holds it in both hands, as if it’s the only warm thing in the room. “Okay, but, like, didn’t she already show you that fundraiser dick pic? I mean, wasn’t that part of your first falling out? The secret photo?”
“That was different,” I say, sharper than intended. “I knew about that one. She admitted it. And she told me everything else, or so I thought.”
