Chapter 18: Try and Top This

’Does Maya Zimmerman seriously not care about money? Does she actually prefer broke losers like Stan Harrison?’

’A cheap hairband made her this happy? A million-dollar Patek Philippe couldn’t compete with a fifty-dollar piece of fabric from a campus gift shop?’

’What in the world is going on?’

It wasn’t just Kyle who was struggling to process it. Half the room was staring at Maya with the same dumbfounded expression, that quiet, slack-jawed disbelief of people whose entire worldview had just been gently knocked sideways.

In their world, gifts were currency, and currency had a clear hierarchy. A million was supposed to beat fifty. That was the rule. That was always the rule.

Kyle, refusing to accept the verdict, leaned in with one last hopeful nudge.

"Maya, my watch really is something special. You should at least try it on."

"It’s nice," Maya said politely. "But I prefer the hairband."

Kyle’s mouth opened. Then closed. Then opened again. Whatever response he’d been preparing died somewhere in the back of his throat. He clicked his tongue once in pure, helpless frustration and went quiet.

He’d walked in here tonight ready to dazzle the entire room with a custom Patek Philippe, a gift that should have, by every law of the social universe, locked Maya’s attention onto him for the rest of the evening. Instead, she was stroking the hairband in her hair like it was the most precious thing she’d ever owned. He couldn’t have been more thoroughly upstaged if Stan Harrison had handed her a folded napkin.

The silence stretched into something genuinely uncomfortable.

A woman near the front of the group cleared her throat with practiced grace and stepped forward, smoothing the moment over with the casual ease of someone who’d hosted a hundred dinners just like this one.

"Alright, everyone, shall we eat?"

The crowd gratefully redirected itself toward the long banquet table, and the awkwardness was quickly buried under the soft clatter of cutlery and the renewed murmur of conversation.

A few minutes into the meal, the doors at the front of the hall opened.

A woman stepped through them, red coat, dark sunglasses, a peaked cap pulled low over her brow. Her face was almost completely obscured, but it didn’t matter.

The figure beneath the coat was so striking that even with most of her face hidden, she would’ve turned heads in any room she walked into. Slim waist, long legs, the kind of unmistakable presence that made conversation taper off without anyone meaning to stop talking.

"Wait, is that Xenia?"

"From TikTuk Live? The Xenia?"

"She just won Best Female Streamer of the Year. What is she doing here?"

Even with the cap and sunglasses, her loyal fans had clocked her within seconds.

Across the table, Kyle Jennings rose slowly to his feet, the smug glow already creeping back into his expression.

This was the moment he’d been waiting for. The watch had been the opening salvo. Xenia was the main event.

He had paid for this entrance. Yesterday, in Xenia’s livestream room, Kyle had dropped three hundred thousand dollars in gifts, a substantial enough tip to earn the right to make exactly one personal request. He’d cashed in that favor for tonight.

’Show up at my friend’s birthday party. Make me look good.’ And here she was, right on cue.

"Xenia! Over here!" Kyle waved, a little too eagerly.

She crossed the room toward him with the easy, confident stride of a woman who knew exactly how many eyes were on her.

"Sorry I’m late."

She lifted off her sunglasses as she reached him, and the entire room got its first proper look at her face, a clean, polished 8.9 by the system’s standards, the kind of face that made men around the table briefly forget what they’d been talking about.

"Whoa..."

"Xenia! I’m a huge fan, could I get a photo?"

"Of course."

The crowd swarmed her almost instantly. Phones came out. Camera shutters clicked.

Even some of the second-generation rich men who normally prided themselves on their composure were shouldering their way forward like teenage fans at a meet-and-greet.

Only Stan Harrison stayed exactly where he was.

He glanced up briefly, registered her face, recognized her instantly, ’yes, that’s the streamer I dropped twenty million dollars worth of rockets on’

Upon seeing her he went back to his food without so much as straightening in his chair.

In honesty, his bar had been raised so dramatically over the past few weeks that a face like Xenia’s no longer carried the same weight.

Sarah, Maya, now Xenia, every woman in the rotation was already at the same tier. None of them stood out the way they would have a month ago, when he was still a broke college student pining over campus belles from a distance.

And besides, he’d already made himself a quiet promise. ’No more simping over girls. Not for anyone. Ever again. Instead make them simp over you’

This vow was still fresh in his mind...

So he stayed in his seat, calmly working through his plate, while half the room flocked around the woman he’d already silently funded.

"Everyone, allow me to introduce you," Kyle announced, voice ringing with pride. "Xenia is a personal friend of mine."

"Wow, I’m honestly jealous."

"Kyle, your connections are unreal. How do you even know her?"

"To get someone like Xenia to come out for a private party? That’s something else."

The flattery rolled in from every direction, and Kyle absorbed every word with the satisfied air of a man basking in well-earned warmth.

"Ah, it’s nothing," he said, waving it off with the kind of false modesty that fooled exactly no one and was meant to fool no one.

He’d successfully reclaimed the spotlight, or at least, he’d successfully reclaimed most of the room.

The hairband incident was already fading from everyone’s mind, buried under the new and far more exciting development of an actual celebrity walking through the door at his invitation.

Kyle let his gaze drift across the room until it landed on Stan, a satisfied curl tugging at the corner of his mouth.

’Try and top this one, bicycle boy.’