Chapter 15 Liam
The dorm room was dark except for the glow of Noah's laptop.
I dropped my keys on my desk. Shrugged off my jacket. Sat on the edge of my bed and started unlacing my shoes.
Got one off.
Stopped.
The lace hung loose in my hand and I just—sat there. Couldn't make myself move. Couldn't make myself do the next thing, whatever the next thing was. Go to sleep. Brush my teeth. Exist like a normal person.
Something had been hollowed out of my chest and I didn't know what it was or when it happened, just that it was gone and the space where it used to be hurt in a way I couldn't name.
Emily hadn't done anything wrong. That was the thing I kept coming back to. She hadn't done anything wrong at all.
And I still felt like I'd been holding my breath for the last two hours and I'd only just been allowed to exhale.
That was the part I couldn't sit with. Couldn't look at directly.
"Liam."
"What."
"You've been holding that shoe for like two minutes."
I dropped it. Lay back on the bed and put my arm over my eyes.
The room was quiet except for Noah's keyboard. Click of keys. The hum of the mini-fridge. Outside, someone was laughing in the hallway, the sound bouncing off concrete walls. It faded.
"How was dinner with Emily?" Noah asked.
My chest went tight. "Fine."
"Okay."
He kept typing. I stared at the ceiling through the crook of my elbow.
The relief was still there. That was the worst part. I'd felt it the second she stopped—this wave crashing through my whole body. She didn't want to have sex. And it was a relief.
What kind of person feels relieved about that?
Noah's typing stopped.
"Alright dude. Out with it."
I raised my head. "Out with what?"
"Whatever the heck happened at dinner." He spun around in his chair. Dark eyes sharp, patient, the way they always were when he was waiting for me to stop bullshitting.
"Nothing. It was fine—"
"Don't start with the repression thing. Best friend, remember?"
I almost smiled, because he was right. He was my best friend and the fact that I hadn't told him any of this—hadn't even come close—sat in my chest like something rotten.
"It's not just dinner," I said.
"Okay."
"It's—" I sat up. Elbows on my knees. Stared at the floor—the worn carpet, Noah's sneakers kicked off by his desk, a granola bar wrapper. "It's been building for a while."
"I know," Noah said.
I looked at him.
"I've been watching you lose your mind for weeks," he said. "I've been waiting."
Something about that made it harder to hold together. That he'd just been sitting here. Patient. Not pushing. Just waiting for me to be ready.
"Alex and I hooked up," I said.
The words came out flat. Stripped. Like ripping off a bandage—fast, no buildup, just the ugly truth underneath.
"First in the closet, during the break-in. Then his dorm room, the next Saturday." I stopped. Swallowed. "And then the other day we kissed in the boathouse. After everyone had left."
Silence.
Noah didn't react. Didn't move. Just let it land.
"I can't control any of it," I said. My voice was starting to come apart at the edges.
"Every time I'm near him I just—I can't. I don't know how to be in the same room and not—" I stopped.
Pressed my hands hard against my knees. "I've tried.
I've been trying for almost two years to not feel this and it doesn't work. Nothing works."
Noah was quiet for a moment. Then, carefully: "Almost two years?"
"This isn't new… we met the summer before freshman year."
"Tell me."
"Noah—"
"Tell me. From the beginning."
I looked at the wall. I couldn't look at him. The words were stuck somewhere between my chest and my throat, two years of keeping them down making them hard to move.
"He worked at the marina with me at Brackett Lake. His family has a summer house and Alex crashed their boat into the dock."
"What?"
"Yeah. He came flying in, crashed the boat. It was this big thing."
"Then how did he—"
"His dad made him work it off like some kind of punishment. Work with the poors."
Noah scoffed and shook his head.
"And it was four weeks." My throat felt thick. "That's all it was. We rowed together once, we talked—there was something there I'd never felt before. With anyone."
I could hear myself saying these words in the dark of my dorm room and they sounded different out loud than they had inside my head. Inside my head they'd been abstract—feelings I could contain, manage, shove into a box. But spoken, they were real.
They had weight. They took up space in the room between us.
"And then he found out I was going to Riverside and he ended it."
The words hung in the quiet. I hadn't said that out loud before. Not once. And hearing it in my own voice—hearing how simple and brutal it was—made something warm creep up from my chest into my face. I'd just been so angry I'd never let myself feel the—
"He hurt me," I said. The words came out surprised, like I was finding that out for the first time. "I was so pissed at him for so long I didn't—I never let myself just—"
"You buried it," Noah said.
"I convinced myself it was nothing. Confusion. Whatever." I looked at the ceiling. "Met Emily, tried to be—normal."
"That crazy man, and you've been holding all of that back?"
"Yeah." Something cracked in my voice. "More than I thought."
Noah slid off his chair and came to sit next to me on the bed. Didn't say anything. Just sat there. Close enough that I could feel the warmth of another person—someone who wasn't going anywhere, wasn't judging, wasn't asking me to be different than I was.
"He's everything. He's just—he's it. He's been it since that summer and I've tried to convince myself otherwise and… I'm so tired."
I stared at my hands like they belonged to someone else—they were shaking.
And then the tears came.
I hadn't expected them. Hadn't wanted them. Had absolutely no control over them.
Hot and burning, pressing up through my eyes before I could stop them, and once they started they didn't stop—just this silent, humiliating collapse of everything I'd been holding together for months.
Years. The effort of pretending. The exhaustion of performing.
The grief of wanting something I'd told myself I couldn't have.
"Hey," Noah said.
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine."
"I know." I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes.
Hard. Like I could push the tears back in.
"I just—I can't keep doing this. I'm losing my mind and I'm hurting Emily, and I didn't even—I didn't even want to get back with her.
I just felt so guilty about everything that I thought if I could just fix it, just be who I was supposed to be—"
The words broke apart.
"But I can't."
Noah didn't try to fill the silence. Just sat there. Steady. Solid.
"She tried to have sex tonight," I said. Quieter now. Hollowed out. "And I couldn't. It just—doesn't work. With her it doesn't work. And when she stopped, Noah—"
"Yeah?" He said.
"I was relieved. I was so relieved I could barely breathe."
The room was very quiet. Just the fridge humming. The distant sound of someone's music through the wall.
"That's not her fault," Noah said.
"I know it's not her fault."
"And it's not yours either. Not in the way you're making it."
I dropped my hands. Looked at him. His expression was steady. Open. No judgment anywhere in it—just the patient clarity of someone who'd been waiting for this conversation and was ready for it.
"I don't know what to do," I said.
"Yeah you do."
"Noah—"
"You just told me you can't control it. You just told me he's everything." He held my gaze. "You know what you want. You're just scared of what it costs."
My chest went tight. "Of course I'm scared. I have to come out. To the team. To Coach Hale. To my mom." My voice dropped. "My scholarship could—" I stopped. Breathed. "And what if I do all that and he leaves again? He's already done it once."
"That's the real one," Noah said.
"What."
"Not the scholarship. Not the team." He met my eyes. "That he'll leave again."
The truth of it landed like hard in my chest.
I looked away. My hands were still shaking. My face was still wet. The dorm room felt too small and too big at the same time—small enough that I couldn't escape what I'd just said, big enough that the silence filled every corner.
"Yeah," I said. Barely sound at all. "That's the real one."
We sat there for a minute. Neither of us saying anything. Just sitting together in the dark room while the truth I'd been running from settled around us like dust.
"Saturday's the mixer," I said finally. "Emily's coming. Sunday's the scrimmage—she's coming to watch me race with him, in front of everyone, and she doesn't know any of this." I looked at Noah. "Forty-eight hours."
Noah nodded.
"Emily deserves better than this," he said. "You know that."
"I know."
"And so do you. You deserve to stop tearing yourself apart trying to fit into something that doesn't fit."
"What if I choose wrong?"
"Then you choose wrong." His voice went softer. "But Liam—you've been choosing wrong every day you've been lying to yourself. At least this way you're being honest."
He reached over and squeezed my shoulder once. Then let go.
"I'm here no matter what you decide," he said. "You know that, right?"
I nodded.
He stood, and went back to his desk.
I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. My face still tight from crying. Eyes stinging.
Forty-eight hours.
I closed my eyes and tried to imagine choosing Emily. Really choosing her. All in. The mixer Saturday, her hand in mine, smiling at donors. Moving forward. Committing.
My chest ached. A deep, resistant ache—like trying to force a door closed against something that wouldn't stop pushing from the other side.
Then I tried to imagine choosing Alex. Everything it meant. Coming out. The team. My mom. His father. Every door it opened and every door it slammed shut.
Terror.
And underneath it—underneath all of it—
Relief.
Like the first real breath after drowning. Like surfacing after being held under for so long I'd forgotten what air tasted like.
I didn't know what I was going to do.
But I knew I couldn't keep doing this.
Something had to give.
And forty-eight hours wasn't very long.