Page 4 of Open Water
She stared at me. Looking for something. The old Liam deflection, the anger that covered everything, the wall going up.
"I wish you could have been like this months ago." She shook her head, inhaled, then let out a big breath.
"I don't hate you because you like guys," she said. "I want you to hear that. I don't care who you're attracted to."
She held my gaze.
"The issue is that you cheated and lied and made me feel like I was losing my mind."
"I know. I'm sorry for cheating on you. For lying to you. I made you feel like you were the problem when I was the problem. All of it was me."
Her chin trembled. She pressed her lips together and it stopped.
"Did I mean anything to you?" she asked.
"Yes." No hesitation. "You were the first person who made me feel like I could be more than angry. And I wasted it. You were never nothing to me, Emily. Never."
She wiped her eye with the heel of her hand.
"Jordan is nice," she said finally. Different register. Like she was testing whether the conversation could hold something lighter. "He's in my childhood psych class. He asked me out by accidentally sending me a text that was meant for his roommate about how nervous he was to ask me out."
I almost smiled. "Smooth."
"It was actually kind of perfect." She looked at her hands. "He's honest. That's the thing I noticed first. He just—says what he's thinking. No games. No walls."
The comparison was obvious. She didn't underline it.
"He sounds good," I said. And meant it. Because sitting across from Emily in that common room, watching her talk about a guy who made her feel safe enough to not have to decode every conversation. I wanted that for her. Not as absolution. Just because she deserved it. She'd always deserved it.
"I hope Alex is right for you," she said.
Different than the last time she'd said those words. In the parking lot it had been a blade and now it was just a question.
"He is," I said. "But that doesn't make what I did to you okay."
And he was. Not in the way I'd wanted Emily to be right—safe, expected, a life I could show people without flinching. Alexwas right the way a current was right. You didn't choose it. You fought it or you let it take you somewhere. I'd spent a year and a half fighting. Lying to Emily, lying to myself, picking fights with the one person who made my pulse do something other than keep time. And the second I stopped fighting — on the water at the Charles, in that hotel room, his breath slowing against my neck while Boston went dark outside the window — everything got quiet. Not easy. Quiet. Like I'd been rowing against the stroke this whole time and finally found the rhythm.
But rhythm didn't erase what it cost to get here. Emily sitting across from me with mascara she hadn't cried off — that was the cost. And if I wanted to keep what I had with Alex, if I wanted it to be real and not just another thing I was hiding inside of, then this was the first wall that had to come down. Not the last. Not even close. But the first.
"No. It doesn't." She stood up. "But I'm glad we talked."
I stood up too. The chair scraped against the linoleum.
She walked to the common room door. Stopped with her hand on the frame.
"Liam, be honest with people. From now on. With Alex, with your friends, with everybody. Stop running from the hard conversations."
"Okay." I nodded.
She left. Her footsteps down the hall, the exterior door opening and closing, the click of the latch. Gone.
I stood in the empty common room.
Be honest with people.
Emily's voice. Clear and certain and bruised and brave.
I thought about the anonymous texter. About Alex's father's arrangements. About the team that needed a captain and the scholarship that hung by a thread and the boy on the other side of the river who'd sent me a heart emoji an hour ago.
