Page 30 of Open Water
I stood up. My legs barely held.
Marcus rolled onto his back. His face was wrong — swollen, split, blood smeared from his nose to his chin. He looked up at me and there was no certainty. No conviction. No righteousness. Just fear.
Good.
I looked at him on the floor. My oldest friend, now my worst enemy.
The photo was out. My teammates. My coaches. My father by morning.
And I felt something I didn't expect.
Relief.
Not clean. Not the kind that comes with a deep breath and a weight lifting. The kind that comes after a bone breaks and the pain hasn't hit yet. The strange clear second where the worst thing has happened and you're still standing and the only direction left is forward.
The secret was out. And I was still standing.
I wiped the blood off my mouth with the back of my hand. Looked at it. Looked at Marcus on the floor.
"I guess I can be myself now."
I walked out of the library. Past the girl with her hand over her mouth. Past the guy frozen at the printers. Through the doors into the November night.
The cold hit my face like a wall. My jaw throbbed. My knuckles were split open and already stiffening. My phone was buzzing in my pocket. Over and over, notification after notification, the sound of my world rearranging itself.
I didn't look at it.
I walked toward the footbridge. Toward the river. Toward Riverside.
Toward Liam.
Chapter 7: Liam
Noah was reading out loud.
Not to me. To himself. Some philosophy thing about whether free will existed or whether every decision we'd ever made was just neurons firing in a predetermined sequence. He did this sometimes. He muttered through dense paragraphs like saying them out loud would make them make sense. It never worked but it was oddly comforting. Background noise. The sound of someone else's brain working while mine was quiet for once.
I was on my bed, laptop open, not looking at it. Thinking about the quad.
The way the boat had felt that morning. Four bodies moving together. Braden behind Tyler, his catch landing clean, his power steady. Remy's calls getting quieter as we found the rhythm — because a good cox knows when to stop talking and let the boat speak for itself.
The thing was, Braden didn't want to be there. Not really. He'd made that clear every day since the lineup was announced. But he'd rowed clean anyway. And that wasn't just Remy's coxing —though Remy was the best cox I'd ever sat behind and I'd fight anyone who said otherwise.
It was the vibe Alex and I brought into the boat. What we had did something to the water around us. Made people want to pull harder. Made Braden forget he didn't want to be there. Made Tyler row like he gave a shit about technique for once in his life.
Alex and I had something. And it was changing the people around us.
Maybe it would be okay. Being out. Being together.
"—the compatibilist would argue that free will is compatible with determinism, but that feels like a cop-out," Noah muttered. "Like saying you chose the sandwich but the universe already knew you were going to—"
My phone buzzed.
Remy.
Remy
Call me right now.
