Page 22 of Open Water
"You can't promise that."
"I'm promising it anyway."
His face was close.
I kissed him. It wasn't a rough kiss. It was just — there. His lips warm and dry and steady. His hand sliding from my jaw to the back of my neck. My hand finding his waist, the strip of skin between his shirt and his jeans.
He pulled me closer. My chest against his. I could feel his heartbeat through our shirts — fast, faster than his calm voice had suggested. He wasn't as steady as he sounded. He was just better at hiding it.
"Come here," he said. Pulling me down. We shifted until we were lying side by side, facing each other. His bed barely wide enough for both of us. My knee between his. His hand on my hip.
We kissed again. Slower. His mouth opening against mine. My hand under his shirt now, spread flat against the small of his back, feeling the muscles shift as he pressed closer. He was hard against my thigh. I was hard against his. Neither of us moved toward it. It was just there. The fact of wanting, steady and alive, held between our bodies without needing to go anywhere.
"Stay," he said. Against my mouth.
"You don't have to ask twice."
Alex smiled, his eyes lighting up.
"You're beautiful you know that?"
He pulled back enough to look at me. His hair messy against the pillow. His eyes dark.
"It's always been you," he said. "I need you to know that. Whatever happens with Marcus, with my father, with any of it. It's you."
I pressed my forehead against his. Eyes closed. Breathing him in.
"I'm going to take care of this," he said. "I'm going to take care of you."
Something in my chest seized. Not the good kind. The scared kind.
Nobody had ever said that to me before. And instead of it feeling like relief, it felt like standing on a ledge. Because I wanted it so badly — wanted someone to carry this with me, wanted to not be the guy who handled everything alone — andwanting something that badly meant it could destroy me if it disappeared.
And Alex had disappeared before. Twice. The last day of summer before freshman year. The 4 AM in his dorm room when he called me a mistake. Both times I'd let him in and both times he'd shut the door and I'd stood on the other side wondering what I'd done wrong.
He was different now. I could feel it. The hand on my back wasn't the hand of someone about to pull away. The voice sayingI'm going to take care of youwasn't the voice that had told me to go.
I felt it in my body in a way my brain couldn't override. And somewhere underneath the warmth of him, underneath how much I wanted this to be real, there was a kid sitting at a kitchen table watching his father's chair stay empty. Learning the lesson early: people who say they'll stay don't always stay.
I wanted it to be Alex. When my mom asked me —who's carrying you?— I'd wanted to say his name and I couldn't.
And I still wanted to it to be him but my body wouldn't let me believe it even though he just said he would. I just didn't know if I could survive being wrong about it again.
So I did the thing I could do.
I pulled him closer and I stayed with him for the night.
Chapter 6: Alex
The footbridge was empty at six in the morning.
I crossed from the Kingswell side with my gear bag over my shoulder and Liam's warmth still fading from my skin. He'd left at five-thirty, kissed my cheek and slipped out quiet, the way he always left. I'd heard the door click and lay there for a minute with my face in the pillow where his head had been. It smelled like his shampoo. The cheap kind. The kind that shouldn't make my chest ache but did.
Last night had cracked something open. Not the Marcus conversation, but when we stopped talking and just lay there. His arm across my chest and his breathing going slow and his body pressed against mine. Both of us hard and neither of us doing anything about it. Just being there with each other.
We'd never done that before, there was always something attached — sex. But not last night, Liam just held on. Like I was something worth keeping despite how my legacy was putting his dreams in jeopardy.
He was still choosing to stay. After everything that happened between us. And I was not going to waste it.
