“My Friends Bet I Couldn’t Do Better Than You—I’m Just Proving Them Wrong,” She Said With A Smug Little Smile After I Caught Her Perched On Another Man’s Lap. I Didn’t Yell. I Didn’t Beg. I Just Looked At Her And Said, “Prove This Too.” Then I Took One Photo, Sent It To Her Parents With, “I Thought You Should See This,” And Walked Out. A Minute Later, My Phone Blew Up. She Was Calling In A Panic—Because Her Dad Had Already Opened The Message.

My voice sounded calm, even to me, because the numbness was insulating. She leaned against the velvet rope like a queen addressing a commoner, then gestured vaguely behind her, encompassing Jared, her friends, the bottle service, the whole glittering facade.

“Alex, look,” she said. “This was fun, but it’s run its course.”

The words were so cliché, so rehearsed, they almost bounced off the ice forming inside me. “Run its course?” I repeated.

“We live together.”

It was a factual statement. We had a lease, shared a grocery list on the fridge, a whole life made of small routines that suddenly felt like set dressing. She let out that sigh again—the one I now understood was pure performance—then glanced back at her audience, who were watching with the rapt attention of people seeing the final act of a play they’d already read the spoilers for.

She turned back to me, and her lips curled into the most brittle, contemptuous smirk I’d ever seen. “My friends bet me I couldn’t do better than you,” she said clearly, ensuring every syllable reached her friends. A titter of laughter rose from the table.

Jared raised his glass in a mock toast. “I’m just proving them wrong.”

The words hung in the smoky air between us. They weren’t just cruel, they were cheap—our two years reduced to the stakes of a childish bet—and the cold numbness in my veins ignited into a single sharp point of absolute clarity.

I looked past her at Jared’s smug, handsome face, at Jessica’s phone pointed right at us, at the whole pathetic tableau. Then I looked back at Chloe, her smirk daring me to cry, to yell, to beg. I didn’t.

I nodded slowly, as if considering a mildly interesting problem, and when I spoke my voice was quiet, flat, and perfectly audible in the space her declaration had carved out. “Prove this, too.”

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