Open Water (Varsity Heat Crew #6)

Chapter 1

My throat tightened. Cold ran through me like ice water dumped down my spine.

This was exactly what I'd been running from.

Emily's eyes met mine. Not the way they used to — not warm or wanting. Something sad moved behind them. But fierce. She was always fierce.

Twenty-four hours ago I'd been on the Charles with Alex. I'd felt more alive in the past day than I had all year. The race, the scouts, his hand finding mine under the covers. Even with everything it complicated it was right.

And what I'd done to Emily was wrong.

Those two things lived in me at the same time: the joy and the debt. I couldn't have what I wanted with Alex if I kept running from what I owed her. She needed this conversation. And if I was honest — I needed it too. I couldn't live with the guilt of hurting Emily anymore.

"Yeah," I said. "Okay."

She didn't come in. Glanced past me at the room—at Noah pretending to organize his desk, at the duffel bag on my floor still packed from Boston.

"Not here," she said. "Downstairs."

The common room on the first floor was empty. Sunday night, late. Everyone was studying, or asleep, or out doing things that didn't involve having hard conversations with their ex who they cheated on.

Emily sat on the couch by the window. I took the chair across from her. The coffee table between us had a ring stain from someone's mug and a campus newspaper from two weeks ago with a headline about the dining hall's new hours.

She kept her coat on. Arms folded.

"You look tired," she said.

"Just got back from Boston. The Charles."

"How'd it go?"

"Fourth place."

"That's good, Liam."

The way she said it genuinely and it made my throat close up. Because that was Emily. Even now. Even after everything. She could still be kind to me when she had every reason not to be.

"Thanks."

"I'm seeing someone," Emily said.

The words came to me, almost as a relief, like she was okay and she was moving on after what I had done.

"His name is Jordan. He's in the education program. We've been going out for about two weeks."

I nodded. Didn't know what to do with my hands, so I put them on my knees.

"That's—I'm glad, Emily. Really."

"I'm not telling you to make you jealous. I'm telling you because—" She stopped. Pressed her lips together. "Because he asked me about you and what happened. And I realized that I'm not over what happened."

She looked at me straight on with steadiness in her eyes.

"I need you to be honest with me," she said.

Pain cut through my chest and I let it. That was the new part.

My whole life, when something hurt, I tensed against it, squared up, found the angle, made it somebody else's fault before it could land.

Punch first. It was the only way I'd ever known how to take a hit.

But Emily wasn't a hit I got to throw back.

She was a girl I'd lied to for months, sitting across from me asking for the one thing I'd never once given her, and I'd promised myself on the walk over that I wasn't going to flinch this time.

So I didn't. I didn't tense. I didn't defend. I just let it sit there in my heart and hurt, because I'd earned every bit of it, and she'd earned the right to watch me feel it.

"Okay."

"I need to know what was really going on. And I need to say some things that I've been holding in..."

Her voice didn't crack. She'd rehearsed this. Probably on the walk over, probably in her head for days before that. Emily was like that—she thought before she spoke, prepared before she acted.

"Say whatever you need to say. I'm not going anywhere," I said.

She unfolded her arms. Set her hands in her lap. Looked at the coffee table for a second then back up at me.

"I loved you," she said.

Loved.

"I saw a future with you. That sounds stupid now. But I did. I thought about what it would be like after college, you rowing somewhere, me doing research. I thought about introducing you to my parents. My dad would have liked you. He's a stubborn asshole too."

Emily's eyes got wet, not streaming tears, just around the edges. Enough to make my chest ache for her.

"And the whole time—" Her voice tightened. Here it came. "The whole time I was building this thing in my head, you were somewhere else. You were thinking about him. I spent months thinking it was me. That I wasn't attractive enough, that I was too needy, that I was doing something wrong."

"Emily—"

"Let me finish."

I shut my mouth. I just wanted to make her feel better.

"Do you know what that does to a person? Thinking you're the problem?"

Heat behind my eyes. My hands gripping my own kneecaps hard enough that the knuckles went white.

"Nothing was broken in you," I said.

"I know that now. But I didn't know it then. Because you let me think it."

My eyes started to get wet too. I didn't argue because she was right.

The radiator clanked.

"How long?" Emily asked.

I knew what she meant.

"The feelings started the summer before freshman year. At the lake. I didn't mean for it to happen, I didn't even know I could have feelings for a guy."

Her face changed slightly, a recalculation behind her eyes.

"Why didn't you just wait to figure it out?" she said.

"There was nothing to figure out. When the summer ended, he ended it with me. And I was just trying to move on. Then we met."

"And when we were together were you thinking about him?"

The honest answer. Not the comfortable one. Noah's voice in my head from months ago: you didn't handle it well.

"Notat first. When we started dating I was done and over with him. He wasn't even part of the equation most of freshman year."

"Most?" Her voice flat.

"It wasn't until the second semester during the race we had against Kingswell."

I never spoke this out loud but Emily deserved to know.

"Then what happened?" She asked.

"I don't know the feelings came back. I was mostly angry."

"And the summer before sophomore year?"

I let out a breath. "I was fighting it. Then this year—"

"I know." Her eyebrows furrowed not wanting to hear it again. "So I was the rebound?"

"No Emily. I had feelings for you."

"But you still had feelings for him?"

"I don't—yes—I guess."

She nodded, her eyes meeting mine. Taking it all in. I could see the memories flying through her mind from our time together.

"We had a great time together Emily."

"Yeah." She looked away as a tear trickled down her face.

"I'm sorry," I said.

She wiped her cheek and looked back to me.

"Are you gay?" she asked. Direct. No judgment in the tone, just a person who needed the truth.

"No. I'm bi."

I said it with the most certainty I had ever said it.

Because it was the truth. I was turned on by guys and girls.

But I was starting to realize that it wasn't about that.

It was the person that I wanted. And there was something about Alex that Emily just didn't have.

There was something about our connection that was beyond anything I had ever experienced.

She nodded slowly.

"So it wasn't that you couldn't be attracted to women."

"No."

"It was that you couldn't be attracted to me."

"It wasn't—" I stopped. Tried again. "I was attracted to you.

But it was never—" I ran my hand through my hair.

The words were wrong. All of them were wrong.

I just had to say the truth. "With Alex, it's like something in my body makes the decision.

Something I can't control. And you deserve someone that feels that way about you. "

Her jaw tightened. She looked away toward the window.

"You know what the worst part is?" she said. "It's not that you're bi. It's not that you fell for someone else. People fall out of love, Liam. It happens. I could have handled that."

She turned back to me.

"It's that you cheated. And you lied. You made me feel crazy for asking questions when you knew the answers the whole time."

I didn't flinch. Didn't look away. Took it.

"You could have just broken up with me. Said you were confused. Said anything." Her voice harder now, the anger arriving, and it was worse than I expected because it was controlled. Emily's anger wasn't heat, it was clarity. "Instead I had to find out by watching you kiss him, Liam."

My eyes were burning. I pressed my palms against my thighs.

"I was a coward. That's not an excuse. It's what happened."

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.

Alex was 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.

I pulled out my phone.

And I just stood there, holding it, thinking about all the conversations I still owed people. The truths I was still carrying alone. Emily had walked in here with her anger and her hurt and her questions, and she'd walked out lighter because she'd said every single one of them out loud.

Maybe that was what brave looked like. Not the big gestures, punching Marcus at a party or breaking into a server room or rowing three miles on the Charles while scouts watched. Just walking up to someone's door on a Sunday night and saying the real thing.

I could do that. Probably. Maybe…