Page 10 of Open Water
"Yeah?"
He had his hands deep in his jacket pockets. His breath visible in the cold. He looked at me the way he'd looked at me across that booth freshman year.
"The people who matter won't be surprised," he said. "They've been waiting for you."
"Thanks, Ethan."
He gave me his two finger salute. He turned left. I turned right.
The stone buildings of Kingswell rose above the bare trees like something designed to make you feel small and permanent at the same time. My shoes on the path. The cold in my lungs. The sky going orange at the edges.
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
Liam
How's your day?
Heat rushed to my chest and I smiled instantly.
Alex
Not bad. You?
We texted all day after that.
Nothing important. The walk to practice, a professor who wouldn't stop talking, what he was eating, what I was avoiding eating. The kind of nothing you only send to someone when the point isn't the words, it's the line staying open. And it made me feel good — stupidly, embarrassingly good — just being connected to him like that. Just knowing he was on the other end of it.
Every time the phone buzzed in my pocket, my heart did something. I'm not going to say I wasn't ready for it, because that's not true — I'd been ready for it for a year and a half. But it did something anyway. Every single time.
It wasn't until later that night, lying in the dark with the screen glowing on the ceiling, that I had the idea.
Chapter 3: Liam
Icrossed the footbridge at five-fifty in the morning because Alex asked me to.
He'd texted at eleven last night.6am, I'll bring food.
Then dropped a pin to a location. No context. No explanation. Just a location on the Kingswell side of the river. I'd set my alarm for five-thirty without thinking about it.
I could've texted backwhere the hell is thisorwhyorit's November, I'm not freezing my dick off at five in the morning.Instead I put on three layers and walked.
Because it was Alex.
The pin led me off the river path, through a gap in birch trees and overgrown holly, to a wooden bench I'd never seen before. Set back from the trail. Hidden. You could hear the river but you couldn't be seen from it.
I sat down. The cold came through my jeans. The river was loud through the branches, the current pulling hard. The sky was dark. The Kingswell lampposts glowed orange somewhere behind me through the trees.
I heard crunching on the path.
Alex came through the gap in the trees carrying a paper bag and two cups. His hair was a mess. Kingswell jacket over a hoodie, the zipper done wrong — one side higher than the other.
"Your zipper's fucked up," I said.
He looked down. "I know." Tried to fix it one-handed while holding the cups.
"Give me those." I took the cups. He fought the zipper with both hands and lost again.
"Just leave it."
