Chapter 13 Liam
I usually sat in the middle—not too eager, not too checked out. Today I was in my normal spot, notebook open, pen in hand, trying to focus.
But I couldn't stop thinking about yesterday.
The boat rack. Alex pressed against it, fiberglass shells rattling above us. His hands fisted in my shirt. The sound he'd made when we pushed together. Our bodies touching like they were meant to be together.
The memory sat in my body like a live wire. Not arousal exactly—something deeper. The awareness that I'd kissed someone and felt more in thirty seconds than I'd felt on a whole date with Emily. I mean she had her hands all over me and I felt nothing.
Professor Chen was talking about human reproduction. We'd been on this unit for a week—reproductive systems, hormones, biological processes.
Then she clicked to a new slide.
Human Sexuality and Sexual Orientation
My stomach dropped.
Seriously?
"Sexual orientation," Professor Chen said, walking across the front of the room, "is a complex interplay of biological, psychological, and social factors.
For many years, Western medicine treated heterosexuality as the default and everything else as deviation.
We now understand that's not only inaccurate—it's harmful. "
She clicked to the next slide. The Kinsey Scale. A gradient from 0 to 6, exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual, with everything in between.
"Alfred Kinsey's research in the 1940s and 50s challenged the binary understanding of sexuality," she continued. "His scale proposed that sexual orientation exists on a spectrum. Most people aren't exclusively one thing or another. They fall somewhere in between."
My heart started hammering.
I looked around the room. Everyone else was taking notes like this was normal. Just another lecture. Another set of facts to memorize for the exam. A girl in the front row was highlighting something in her textbook. The guy next to me was checking his phone under his desk.
Nobody's world was being rearranged.
Just mine.
My hand wasn't moving. The pen sat motionless against the notebook page. I stared at the slide—that clean gradient, 0 to 6, like you could plot a human life on a simple scale.
"Bisexuality," Professor Chen said, "is a valid sexual orientation. Not a phase. Not confusion. Not someone who 'hasn't decided yet.' It's an attraction to more than one gender that exists independently of relationship status or current partner."
She paused. Looked around the room.
"Many bisexual individuals face erasure—from both straight and gay communities.
If they're in an opposite-sex relationship, people assume they're straight.
Same-sex relationship, people assume they're gay.
But bisexuality doesn't disappear based on who you're dating.
It's not contingent on behavior. It's an orientation. "
The air in the lecture hall felt thick. Too warm. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead—a sound I'd never noticed before but suddenly couldn't ignore.
Someone raised their hand. "Is bisexuality genetic?"
"We don't have a clear answer," Professor Chen said. "Current research suggests sexual orientation is likely influenced by a combination of genetic, hormonal, and environmental factors. But there's no single 'gay gene' or 'bi gene.' Human sexuality is too complex for simple determinism."
Another hand. "Can it change over time?"
"Sexual fluidity is real for some people," she said. "But fluidity doesn't mean choice. You can't choose who you're attracted to any more than you can choose your eye color. What can change is awareness. Acceptance. Willingness to acknowledge what's always been there."
My pen was shaking slightly. I set it down before anyone could see.
You can't choose who you're attracted to.
But I'd been trying. God, I'd been trying. Trying to want Emily the way I wanted Alex. And I had wanted Emily… but that was fading.
"The important thing to understand," Professor Chen continued, "is that sexual orientation—whether heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, asexual, or anywhere else on the spectrum—is a normal variation of human experience. There's nothing to fix. Nothing to cure. It simply is."
Normal variation.
She clicked to the next slide. Started talking about hormones and neural pathways.
I couldn't hear her anymore.
My brain was stuck on that Kinsey Scale.
On the words bisexuality is a valid orientation, not a phase.
On the fact that I'd spent my entire life telling myself I didn't have time to think about any of this—that attraction to Alex was confusion, a fluke, something I'd grow out of if I just tried hard enough with someone else.
But I hadn't grown out of it. It had only gotten louder.
Class ended at 10:50. I packed my stuff slowly, waiting for the room to empty. Didn't want to walk out in a crowd. Didn't want anyone to see my face and read whatever was written across it.
Outside, the October air hit cold against my neck. Leaves blowing across the walkway, students cutting between buildings with backpacks and coffees, the hum of a campus that didn't know or care that my world had just tilted sideways.
I didn't go back to the dorm. Couldn't sit in that cinderblock room staring at the wall while my brain ate itself alive. My body needed to move. Needed somewhere that didn't require me to think.
The Riverside boathouse was a ten-minute walk from the science building. Down the wide sidewalk past the parking lots, across the access road, down the gravel slope toward the river.
When I got there, I used my ID on the reader to get in.
I headed upstairs to the erg room and it was almost empty.
Almost.
Remy sat on the floor between two Concept2s, back against the wall, laptop on his knees, earbuds in.
His cox box headset sat next to him on the rubber mat—dented, held together with electrical tape, the same one he'd been using since freshman year.
A half-eaten protein bar balanced on the arm of the nearest erg.
He looked up when I came in. Pulled one earbud out.
"Bro. You look terrible."
"Thanks."
"I call it like I see it." He looked back at his screen. "Thought you had class till eleven."
"Got out early."
I changed in the locker room—shorts, tank top, beat-up Nikes—and left my stuff on the metal bench by my locker.
Back upstairs, I picked the erg near Remy. Usually, I'd be halfway across the room, but I didn't trust myself to be that alone.
I strapped my feet in. Grabbed the handle. Set the damper to seven.
Didn't pull.
Just sat there. Hands gripping the handle. Staring at the blank performance monitor.
Bisexuality is a valid orientation. Not a phase. Not confusion.
I pulled. Hard. The flywheel screamed to life and the chain rattled through the housing.
First ten strokes were garbage. All arms, no legs, the kind of form that would've earned me a week of technique drills if Hale saw it. I didn't care. I just needed the noise in my skull to quiet down.
It didn't.
You can't choose who you're attracted to any more than you can choose your eye color.
Harder. The monitor flickered — 1:38 split, 1:35, 1:33. Race pace. Stupid for a random Tuesday when I had a scrimmage in two days, but my body was running on something that wasn't logic.
What can change is awareness. Acceptance. Willingness to acknowledge what's always been there.
Always been there.
"You're going to blow out your lower back pulling like that."
I eased off. Let the split climb back to something sane. My lungs were already scorched from the sprint.
I rowed at steady state for a few minutes.
The rhythm helped—legs, back, arms, arms, back, legs.
Repetitive enough to dull the edges. Through the windows along the far wall I could see the river, grey-brown in the late morning light, a single sculler from the community program cutting a line through the flat water.
"What are you watching?" I asked. Because silence was worse.
"Footage from Monday." Remy tilted his laptop screen toward me without getting up. "Coaches want me to pull pacing data on the doubles before Thursday."
Monday.
My hands tightened on the erg handle.
On his screen, a launch-cam wide shot—the river, a double moving through the frame left to right. Two rowers in near-perfect symmetry. Catches landing together. Bodies moving in mirror. The boat running so clean it barely left a wake.
Me and Alex.
I stopped pulling. The flywheel wound down with a low whine.
"That's you and Alex," Remy said.
"I can see that."
He tapped his trackpad. Rewound. Played it again, slower this time.
The boat glided through the frame and I watched my own back—the drive phase, legs pushing, body swinging open—and behind me, Alex matching it exactly.
Not following. Matching. Like he was inside my nervous system, reading each stroke before I finished it.
"Watch the catch here." Remy pointed. Rewound three seconds. Slow motion. Both blades entering at the same angle, same depth, same fraction of a second. "You can't coach that. That's not technique—that's something else."
I didn't answer because I knew what it was.
"And this—" He scrubbed forward in the timeline.
"Power ten at the twelve hundred. Your boat speed jumps from 4:02 pace to 3:48 in three strokes.
" He looked up at me. "Three strokes, Liam.
That's a fourteen-second split drop. I've coxed boats for three years, and I've never seen that from a doubles pair on their first row together. "
"It was a good session," I said.
Remy tilted his head. That look he did—calculating, reading things you weren't saying. The coxswain stare. "I also watched this morning's footage."
My jaw tightened.
"Night and day." He closed the laptop halfway. "Monday you two looked like you shared a brain. This morning you looked like two strangers who'd been handcuffed together against their will." He paused. "What changed?"
"Nothing changed."