Page 35 of Open Water
We sat there. The room quiet except for the hum of the overhead light. His hand steady in mine now. The trembling gone.
"Stay here tonight," I said.
"Sure? What about Ethan?"
"It's fine. We're really in this now."
He kicked off his shoes. I kicked off mine. We lay down on my bed — the Riverside version, narrow, barely room for two — and I pulled him close. His back against my chest. His injured hand cradled against his stomach. My arm around him.
His breathing slowed. Mine didn't.
Alex was asleep in minutes. The exhaustion pulling him under like a current. I held him and listened to the building settle and the river outside and the sound of everything being different now.
After a while, I carefully untangled myself. Slid my arm out from under him. He shifted but didn't wake. He just curled tighter around his injured hand and made a small sound.
I went to the window.
The bridge was lit up. The footbridge between Riverside and Kingswell, the one Alex had just walked across — bloody, broken, choosing me.
In eight hours I was going to walk into the boathouse and every person in it was going to know.The photo wasn't a rumor you could deny or a whisper you could outlast. It was evidence. Permanent. Screenshotted and forwarded and living on thirty phones that would become sixty that would become everyone.
I'd spent my whole life being underestimated. I'd learned to use that, to let people see what they expected and then beat them on the water where it mattered. But this was different. This wasn't being underestimated. This was beingseen.The real thing. The thing I hadn't barely even fully named for myself yet out in the open where I couldn't shape it or control it or decide when and how people learned it.
Marcus had taken that from both of us.
My phone lit up on the desk.
Mom
Hi baby. Just thinking about you. Hope you're having a good week. Love you.
The nothing text. The kind she sent sometimes on Tuesday nights or Thursday mornings or whenever I crossed her mind between shifts.
I stared at it for a long time.
She didn't know. Right now, in this moment, Linda Moore was sitting in the kitchen or lying in bed or driving home from the late shift, and her son was just her son. The boy who rowed. The boy who got the scholarship. The boy she'd always believed in.
By tomorrow or next week she might know something else that boy.
I didn't answer. I couldn't. Not tonight.
I'd tell her. On my terms. When I could sit with her — or at least call her — and say it with my own voice.
But not tonight.
I put the phone down.
I went back to bed and pulled Alex close. He murmured something I couldn't hear and pressed back against me.
Tomorrow we had practice. Tomorrow we'd walk into that boathouse. Together.
I closed my eyes and didn't sleep.
Chapter 8: Alex
Iwoke up at 5:12 AM in a bed that wasn't mine.
Narrow mattress. Cinderblock walls painted the color of wet concrete. A window with blinds that didn't close all the way, letting in a strip of pre-dawn gray. The room smelled like cheap laundry detergent and something vaguely athletic. Old sweat baked into fabric that no amount of washing fully killed.
