Page 69 of Open Water
I looked at my best friend, his ears red, guard down, grinning because a coxswain from Riverside had sat up all night talking to him. The easy version. Two people who got stuck next to each other on a bus and just kept choosing to keep talking. No father two hundred miles away. No bridge crossed in the dark. No war. They just liked each other and let themselves have it.
The thing I'd spent the whole film building in my head, sitting right across the table from me.
"What?" Ethan said.
"Nothing," I said. "I'm happy for you."
And I was. I also knew, sitting there, exactly what I was going to do.
The plan I told Liam I'd make, was made.
Chapter 15: Liam
He texted at 6:40 at night.
Alex
Back. You up?
I looked at the phone for a while before I answered. I had so much to say to Alex and I couldn't wait to see him again.
Liam
Bridge. Ten min.
Alex
See you soon.
I sat on the edge of my bed and put my shoes on slow, one lace at a time. Because as badly as I wanted to see Alex, I was still scared of what he could say but even more so I was scared of what I knew I needed to say to him.
I hadn't answered Alex once all weekend. I'd told myself it was respect — he was in Vermont doing the thing he needed to do with Ethan and I wasn't going to be the needy one blowing up his phone while he figured out his life. That was the story I'd run, even if it was half true.
I crossed the quad, the trees stripped down to black against a sky that had already gone dark at six. The river got louder before I could see it and the days of rain had it running high and fast, the kind of current that takes an oar if you're stupid with it.
The footbridge.
He was standing in the middle of it. Hands in his pockets. And I stopped at the Riverside end and just looked at him for a second, because something was off and I needed to find out what before I got close enough for him to read me.
It took me a second to place it.
The mask was gone.
Last time I saw him — his dorm, the lamp, the quarter-zip and the smooth composed face I hadn't seen in a week — he'd had it all bolted back on. Now he didn't. He looked tired and cold and like himself. Like the version of him that brought bagels to a hidden bench and let me fix his zipper. Whatever happened in Vermont had taken the armor off and not put it back.
That's a trick,the voice in me said.
I told it to shut up.
I walked out onto the bridge.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey."
We stood there. The river underneath us doing what water does. Both campuses lit up on either side. Kingswell's stone towers behind him, Riverside's flat concrete behind me, and us in the middle on the thing that connected the two worlds that weren't supposed to connect.
"You didn't text back," he said. Not an accusation. Just a fact set down between us.
