Page 72 of Open Water
"Yeah."
I pulled back enough to look at him. The bruise on his jaw was almost gone now, just a yellow shadow. The thing he got defending us.
"Then say it," I said. "What you are."
He huffed a laugh. "You want me to—"
"Say it."
He looked at me. Steady. Not a crack in it.
"I'm your boyfriend."
The word landed somewhere in the middle of my chest and stayed there. The idea I'd choked on just a few days ago. The word I'd been too much of a coward to put on the truest thing in my life.
And it was mine now. Ours.
"Yeah," I said. And then, because it was getting too heavy and I needed somewhere to put the weight, "Took you long enough, golden boy."
He laughed. I felt it more than heard it, his shoulder against mine, his leg against my leg, the small bench holding two people who'd spent three months pretending it could only hold one.
We sat there a while. Didn't say much. There wasn't much left to say that words were good for.
It wasn't fixed. I knew that even then, with his hand warm in mine and the cold trying to get through my jacket. The hearingwas tomorrow. He'd sit in a room in front of the dean and the lawyers and probably his father, one way or another, and they'd decide whether he got to stay at Kingswell or got thrown out for the crime of hitting the guy who'd spent months hunting us.
None of that was solved. None of it was even close.
But this part was. This one thing on the whole board had stopped moving. He was my boyfriend. He'd said the word. And whatever came tomorrow, it was coming at the two of us, not at me alone at a window watching the headlights go.
"It's freezing," Alex said into my shoulder.
"Yeah."
"I don't care."
"Me neither." I tightened my hand around his. "Five more minutes."
The river ran high and loud in the dark. Both campuses burned on either side of it. And between them, on a bench nobody knew about, two terrified idiots who'd both already jumped sat in the cold and stayed.
Chapter 16: Alex
Iknotted the tie three times before it sat right. Navy, half-Windsor. The same knot my father taught me in front of the mirror at the lake house when I was nine, his hands over mine.Over, under, through, pull.A man's knot.A man's knot is the first thing a room reads about him,he'd said.
It was one thing to call my father and tell him no — to tell him I was gay, that I was with Liam. It was another thing entirely to walk into that room and face what I'd done to Marcus in the library without my father's power behind me. I didn't know what was going to happen. All I knew was that I'd done the right thing. For me. And for Liam.
And here I was, standing in the mirror in the expensive suit my father had bought me. The bruise on my jaw had gone yellow-green, almost gone now, just a smudge you'd miss if you weren't looking for it. The Harrington face looked back at me. Smooth, composed, and ready. And underneath it my heart was going like I'd just come off a 2K.
This was the first room of my life I was walking into without my family. But I had Liam and that was going to have to be enough.
I was terrified.
***
Liam was outside my dorm when I came out.
"You look good," he said.
I smiled because he said it, even though my body was falling apart from anxiety.
