Eventually Mariya was either going to have to tell him the truth and come clean or otherwise tell him an outright lie. There wasn't going to be any way around that. She would have to decide to do things one or the other way. After all, it would have looked like she was headed toward a point where that was going to be needed since it was going to come up in the conversation sooner or later.<br/><br/>As it had looked like she was really interested in the park, Vitali perked right back up. It looked like they were going to be able to share something in common. Honestly, he hadn't thought of betting at all before she had brought it up. He had just wanted to play a game for fun. He then remembered what they would do as children, however.<br/><br/>That really honestly had sounded fun. He couldn't remember how long it had been, though he had supposed he could calculate it in the number of years since he had last played a game with her if he hadn't been so wistful. Then she had made something as an offer to him. With that he laughed, and even soon enough he was actually blushing toward her.<br/><br/>While Vitali wasn't quite sure how she was going to respond to what he had said next, he realized that there wasn't going to be any way to un-say it. Once something was spoken, it couldn't be taken back so easily. "How about if I win, you win or we draw, then you still get to marry your heroic man?"<br/><br/>There wasn't any way that he could have been sure of how she would respond to that. For that matter, there wasn't any way that he could have known how she would respond to his own response to whatever it was that she had said. Still, he had to let her know how he felt in no uncertain terms at this point. None of this was joking anymore, since he had wanted them to be together forever.<br/><br/>At this point, he didn't realize it but that wasn't a realistic goal at all.