Page 43 of Open Water
Hale put a sophomore named Garrett in bow. Kid weighed maybe one-sixty, rowed like he was afraid of the oar. Every catch a half-beat late. Every drive missing the snap that Alex brought, his specific efficiency that came from a lifetime of perfect technique nobody else could match.
The boat dragged. I could feel it in my hamstrings, in the extra load on every stroke, the hull sitting heavy in the water instead of lifting. Yesterday this boat had breathed. Today it was furniture.
Remy tried. Called the rate changes. Worked the rhythm. But you can't cox a ghost into a seat.
We did a 2K piece and the split was fifty seconds off yesterday's pace. Fifty seconds. In rowing, that's a different sport.
Nobody said anything when we docked. Braden racked his oar and walked inside without looking at me. Tyler said "that sucked" to no one in particular. Garrett apologized three times in two minutes until Remy told him it wasn't his fault.
It wasn't. It was Marcus's fault. And now Marcus was somewhere nursing a broken face and Alex was across the river with campus police and I was standing on a dock holding an oar that felt heavier than it should have.
I racked the oar and headed inside.
Braden caught me by the erg bay.
"Hey, Moore. Listen, I just wanted to say—"
"Don't."
He stopped. My voice had come out harder than I meant it to… or exactly as hard as I meant it to.
"I was just going to say I hope—"
"I don't care what you were going to say." I was already walking. The words came out automatic, the anger program booting up before I could think about whether Braden deserved it. He probably didn't. Didn't matter. I couldn't stand there and have a conversation about it. About any of it, especially not with a Kingswell guy.
I showered. Changed. Stood in the locker room doorway for a full minute before walking out.
***
The campus was a problem.
Every face was a question. Every pair of eyes that landed on me and held for a half-second too long — were they looking because they knew? Had they seen the photo? Had someone forwarded it? The Kingswell group chat was thirty guys. Thirty guys with girlfriends, roommates, friends on other teams. By now it could be a hundred people.
Two hundred. The whole athletic department. Both fucking schools.
A guy from my econ class passed me on the path near Morrison Hall. He looked at me. Looked away. Normal? Or thekind of looking away where you've already seen the photo and you're pretending you haven't?
I didn't know. That was the thing that made my skin crawl. I couldn't tell. I couldn't tell who knew and who didn't, who was thinking about it and who was just walking to class, who had seen a photo of me kissing another guy and had an opinion about it.
This was the thing I'd been afraid of since the beginning. This. The world knowing something about me that I couldn't take back. The feeling of being looked at by people I hadn't chosen to show myself to.
And it wasn't just me. Alex was across the river with university police. Everything was at risk. Alex's spot on the team, his entire future at Kingswell, all of it was on the table because he'd beaten Marcus bloody defending us.
Defendingme.
Alex could lose everything. Not in the way I'd been worried about my own scholarship for weeks. Actually lose it. Get expelled. Get disowned. Or whatever Harringtons did to their gay kids.
And I couldn't do anything about it. I was standing outside the lecture hall with my hands shaking and there was absolutely nothing I could do except walk into a lecture about supply curves and pretend the world hadn't changed.
Every lecture hall in the building was filling up. Finals prep. Review sessions. The end-of-semester grind I should've been part of — econ, A&P, the English seminar I was actually passing. I stood there watching students file in with laptops and coffee cups and the urgency of people whose biggest problem was a cumulative exam.
I couldn't go in.
A girl from my A&P class was coming down the hall. Short, dark hair, always sat two rows ahead of me and took notes in colored pens. I didn't know her name. She'd never spoken to me.
She stopped.
"Hey. Liam, right?"
