Page 87 of Open Water
"Now go get warm. You sound like you're standing in the wind."
I smirked.
"Friday. Four o'clock. Love you," she said.
"Love you too."
I stayed out there a minute after she hung up.
The river ran in front of me, high and fast and black. On either side of it, both campuses lit up against the early dark —Riverside on the left, low and broke and mine, Kingswell on the right, all stone and money. The footbridge strung between them with its lamps coming on.
Come January I'd be the one running the morning sessions. Setting the lineups, working the freshmen too hard the way Hale promised I would. I didn't know exactly what was coming for the boat — the quad had clicked exactly once before it lost Alex to the suspension.
A lot of it was up in the air. But the seat Jace left was mine now whether I felt ready or not, and here's what I kept circling back to: this had been the best year of rowing in my life. Fourth at the Head of the Charles — the first time our program cracked the top five in decades. My splits lower than they'd ever been. A whole season where the boat just kept getting faster every time we put it on the water.
And I'd do it because Jace saidyou're the guy now.Because Hale saiddon't be late.Because my mom worked doubles for fifteen years and never asked for anything but for me to be happy. Because Alex crossed a bridge with blood on his face and chose me over everything he had.
I'd do it because I was Liam Moore.
Scholarship kid. Captain-in-waiting. Bisexual. Rower. Boyfriend. Son.
All of it. At once. Out loud. No box, no lock, nothing buried anymore.
I walked up off the dock and headed home through the December dark, the boathouse black behind me, and finally… nothing was chasing me.
Chapter 22: Alex
For three days, things were almost okay.
That was the strangest part. After two months of everything detonating in sequence the rest of the month was quiet. Nothing was resolved but everything was settled.
The hearing was done. The team knew, the campus knew, and somewhere in there the knowing had stopped being an event and started being a fact, the way a scar stops being a wound. Liam and I walked to the dining hall together and nobody looked twice. We were just two guys, out, in the open, and the sky had not once fallen.
I'd half-expected to be punished for that. The settling. Like the universe was going to send a bill.
I was packing for Brackett Lake when it came.
My father expected me Saturday.
I hadn't spoken to him since Vermont. Since the gas station outside Brattleboro. Weeks now.
The longest stretch of silence between me and him in my entire life and I knew enough about my father to know that the silence was not peace. My father didn't go quiet when he'd givenup. He did this when he was building something, the way the lake goes still and glassy in the hour before the weather turns. The calm is not the absence of the storm. The calm is the storm getting organized.
"You're folding that shirt like it owes you money," Liam said.
He was sprawled on my bed in his gray Riverside hoodie, one knee up, watching me pack with the lazy attention of a guy who had nowhere else he needed to be. We'd spent the afternoon like this. Talking about nothing. About Christmas, him on the bus Friday to his mom's, me up to the lake Saturday. Same water, opposite shores, the way it had always been.
"It's a good shirt," I said.
"It's a shirt. Come here, you're being weird."
I almost did. I had one knee on the bed, his hand already reaching for the front of my shirt, his mouth already doing the thing it does right before… and my phone rang on the desk.
I knew, the way you know, that it was my father. The silence ending. I crossed the room with my stomach in my throat and looked at the screen.
It wasn't him.
Coach Eldridge.
