Page 71 of Open Water
"Let me finish or I won't get there." I breathed. "I'm done pretending this is nothing. I don't want to call it nothing anymore. I want it to be real. I want you. That's it. So whatever you have to say… it better be a good plan. Because leaving me isn't an option."
The trees ticked in the wind. The river kept on under everything.
"So now you can tell me," I said. "Whatever you came back with."
He was quiet for a long moment.
Then he laughed, a short, awkward sound, almost nothing, his breath catching on the way out.
"I don't have a plan."
The voice in me wentthere it isbefore I could stop it. I felt my face start to close.
He saw it. Caught my wrist before the wall finished going up.
"No. Listen to me." His hand stayed on my wrist. "I tried. The whole drive up and back. And I sat there looking for the version where I keep youandkeep all of it. The money, the name, the future, the family. The one where nobody loses anything."
His thumb moved once against the inside of my wrist.
"It doesn't exist, Liam. He built it so it doesn't exist. There's no third door. There's the door where I lose you and the door where I lose everything else, and that's it, that's the whole house, and he's the one who drew it." He let out a breath. "So I stopped looking for a plan. Because that was just another way of trying not to choose."
"Alex?"
"I called him and I told him no."
The river. The wind. My heart doing something stupid in my chest.
"I told him I'm not taking the deal." His voice didn't shake. It was just steady. "I told him I'm gay and I'm with you and if that costs me everything, then it costs me everything. And then I stopped talking and waited."
"What'd he say?"
"Nothing. Fucking nothing." Alex looked at the dark between the trees. "He hung up. Didn't say one word. Just — gone. Quietest he's ever been with me in my life."
I should have felt relief. Mostly I did. But underneath it something cold moved, because I knew what it felt like to be abandoned by a father.
"I'm sorry Alex."
His eyes got wet. "No. It's okay. It's his choice. Not mine," he said, voice cracking. "I don't know what's going to happen but I know I have you. And that's what really matters."
He'd done it without telling me. He'd done it not knowing if I'd even still be here when he got back. I'd spent the whole weekend going silent to protect myself, and the entire time, two hundred miles north, he'd been burning down his own life on the chance that I'd be standing at the bridge when he got home.
We'd both jumped. Neither of us knowing the other one had.
"I've been choosing you the whole time," he said. "I know it didn't look like it. I know theokaylooked like the opposite. But I chose you when I walked across that bridge with blood on my face. I chose you on the dock at Brackett Lake when I kissed you. I've been choosing you since I was eighteen and too scared to say it out loud." He shrugged, helpless. "I'm just done being too scared now. That's the only thing that changed. I ran out of scared."
My throat had gone tight and useless both of our eyes starting to tear up.
I leaned in and I kissed him.
On the bench. The hidden one. The one that used to be a secret because we were a secret, and wasn't anymore, because we weren't. His mouth cold and then not cold. His hand coming up to the side of my face the way it did at the lake the first time, the touch that he said was the moment he knew. The world goingon around us and neither of us flinching, because there was no one to flinch for, and there never would be again.
When we broke apart his forehead came down against mine. We breathed. The cold made clouds between us.
"So," I said. My voice came out rougher than I meant. "We're doing this. For real."
"Yeah."
"Out loud. All of it. No bench-in-the-dark, no five a.m., no driving an hour away so nobody sees."
