Chapter 8
Narrow mattress. Cinderblock walls painted the color of wet concrete.
A window with blinds that didn't close all the way, letting in a strip of pre-dawn gray.
The room smelled like cheap laundry detergent and something vaguely athletic.
Old sweat baked into fabric that no amount of washing fully killed.
Liam's room. Liam's bed. Liam's arm still heavy across my stomach.
My right hand throbbed. I held it up in the half-light. The knuckles were swollen into a ridge of purple and black, the skin split across two fingers, dried blood crusted in the creases. My jaw ached where Marcus had hit me. When I touched it, the bruise sang.
The thought arrived the way my father's voice always did, automatic, uninvited, already organized into a schedule. Forty-eight minutes. Shower, dress, walk to the boathouse.
Walk to the boathouse. Together.
Liam stirred behind me. His arm tightened. His face pressed into the back of my neck and I felt his breath change — the shift from sleep-breathing to the shallow, faster rhythm of someone surfacing.
"Hey," he said. Voice rough.
"Hey."
"What time?"
"Five twelve."
"Fuck." But he didn't move. His arm stayed. His mouth was against my neck, warm, and his hand found my hip under the blanket and settled there. "How's the hand?"
"Operational."
"Operational." I could hear him almost smile. "Very Harrington of you."
"My jaw's worse."
His fingers traced up from my hip. Found my ribs. My chest. Stopped over my heartbeat.
"We have practice," I said.
"I know."
"Forty-seven minutes."
"I know."
Neither of us moved.
"Shower?" he said.
"Here?"
"No, I'll walk you across the bridge to the Kingswell spa." His hand was still on my chest. "Yes, here. It's early enough. Nobody's up."
***
The Riverside communal bathroom was… institutional. Fluorescent lights that buzzed at a frequency designed to prevent relaxation. White tile going yellow at the grout lines. Six shower stalls with plastic curtains that didn't reach the floor.
At 5:20 AM, it was empty.
Liam turned on the last stall. The water took a minute to heat, much longer than Kingswell's pipes, which I noticed and hated myself for noticing.
He pulled his shirt over his head in one motion.
His shoulders were broad. The rowing had done that.
Thickened the lats, carved the lines along his obliques, built the kind of back that moved boats.
A faded bruise on his ribs from catching the oar handle wrong last week.
Freckles across his shoulders from summers at the marina.
He pushed his joggers down and stepped out of them and I tracked every movement like something I'd been starving for.
My body responded before my brain had a vote. The blood going south with a certainty that was almost absurd given that I'd just beaten my oldest friend bloody on a library floor.
But that was the thing. The secret was out and Marcus had pressed send. Every phone on the Kingswell team had the photo. My father had probably seen it by now. The life I'd been protecting — the careful, calibrated, performance-of-Alex-Harrington life — was already in pieces on the floor.
And I was still here. Still breathing. Still wanting him.
So I stopped fighting it. could want him without any consequence because that consequence was already in progress.
He turned toward the shower and I watched him go. The lines of his back narrowing to his waist. The curve of his ass. Tight, built from ten thousand strokes on the erg.
He's so hot. And he's mine.
My dick was almost fully hard at this point.
Liam glanced over his shoulder. His eyes dropped and he could probably see the outline of my dick in through my boxers. The corner of his mouth twitched.
"Getting a little excited there, golden boy?"
"Shut up."
"I'm just saying. Rough night and everything."
"I said shut up."
He grinned. The real one. The one that made him look like the kid on the dock that first summer. Before the rivalry, before the secrets, before any of it.
He pulled the curtain and stepped in. I took off my clothes and followed.
The stall was barely big enough for one person. Two was an engineering problem. His shoulders took up most of the width. I pressed my back against the tile — cold, then warm where the water bounced off him and hit me — and he stepped closer and the space between us went to nothing.
"Your face," he said. His thumb traced the bruise on my jaw. Careful. "Does it hurt?"
"Yes."
He kissed it. Just his lips against the bruise. Soft enough that it didn't hurt and deliberate enough that my whole body registered the intention behind it.
"What about here?" His mouth moved to the corner of my lips.
"No."
"Liar."
He kissed me. Slow. The water running between our mouths. His hand slid up my side and his fingers wrapped around the back of my neck and pulled me in and the kiss deepened and I stopped thinking about the bruise.
His mouth left mine and moved down my jaw. My neck. Found the spot below my ear where my pulse was hammering and stayed there — lips and tongue and the edge of his teeth — and my head fell back against the tile.
"Liam —"
He kissed across my collarbone. Down the center of my chest. His mouth was warm and the water was warm and the tile behind me was cold and the contrast made every nerve ending fire at once.
He dropped lower. Kissed my sternum. The ridge of my abs.
His lips dragging slow across wet skin, his hands on my hips holding me against the wall.
I looked down at him. Water running down his back. The muscles in his shoulders shifting as he moved. His mouth trailing lower across my stomach, following the line of hair below my navel, and his green eyes looked up at me through the water.
Oh.
That was all. Just — oh. The sight of Liam on his knees in front of me, looking up through wet hair with those eyes, his mouth an inch from where I needed it. My cock was so hard it ached. I could feel my pulse in it.
He wrapped one hand around my dick. Held me. Studied it like he was memorizing the weight and shape. Then he leaned forward and ran his tongue across the tip. Slow, tasting it.
My knees almost gave out.
"Fuck —"
"Easy." His hand steadied my hip.
He licked again. A long, flat stroke from base to tip that made my vision blur. Then his tongue circled the head, found the ridge underneath, pressed there. I was leaking precum and he licked that up too.
He dropped lower. His tongue on my balls, wet and warm, his hand still wrapped around my shaft stroking in slow pulls. The combination of his mouth on my balls and his hand on my dick made me grab the shower rail.
"Jesus, Liam."
He didn't answer. Just came back up and took me in his mouth.
The heat. The pressure. His lips tight around me, sliding down, taking more than I expected.
His cheeks hollowed and he pulled back slow, then sank again, finding a rhythm.
His free hand dropped between his own legs and I watched him start to stroke himself — his fist working in the same tempo as his mouth on me, his eyes closing for a second as the pleasure registered.
He moaned and it made my dick throb in his warm mouth.
I looked down at him. Across my stomach, past the water running in rivulets down my abs, to his face. His green eyes opened and found mine. Held them. My cock sliding between his lips, his hand between his legs, the water streaming over both of us.
And the thing I'd been carrying. The thing I'd known since the dock at Brackett Lake, the thing I'd felt at the Charles when his blade entered the water at the same instant as mine, the thing that woke me up in the middle of the night and sat on my chest like a second heartbeat — it named itself.
The way a word you've been trying to remember finally surfaces and you realize you knew it all along.
I loved him.
I loved Liam Moore. The guy from the marina.
The scholarship rower who had no business being in my life and had become the only part of it that was real.
I loved his anger and his stubbornness and his hands and his mouth and the way he looked at me like I was worth something even when I never felt like I was.
I'd never say it. Not yet. The word was too big for a shower stall at five in the morning with my life in free fall.
Liam's eyes were still on mine. His mouth still on me. His hand still working himself. I could see him getting close, his rhythm losing its steadiness, his breath catching around me, his thighs tensing.
The feeling of love and the want fused into the same current. Every nerve ending in my body lit up at once. The recognition in my chest feeding the pressure at the base of my spine, amplifying it, making it unbearable.
The orgasm hit before I saw it coming. A wave that breaks before you see it crest. My hand found his head. My fingers in his wet hair. My hips pressing forward.
"Oh god Liam—"
He took everything. Swallowed. Kept his mouth on me through the aftershocks while his own hand moved faster and I watched him come a moment later. His groan vibrating through my cock, his eyes squeezing shut, his whole body shuddering against my legs.
The water ran over us. Neither of us moved.
Then Liam rested his forehead against my hip. His breathing ragged. His hand still loosely holding himself. I ran my fingers through his wet hair and the shower drummed on his back and on the tile and on the curtain and everything was quiet.
Liam stood up and wrapped his hands around my hips pressing his forehead against mine, nose brushing mine.
"It's going to be okay. I don't know how. But it will," he said.
I kissed him in agreement and wrapped my arms around his shoulders the buried my face in his neck. My chest throbbed with heat… in a good way. A love way.
Eventually, he said, "we should go."
"Yeah."
Neither of us moved.
"Five more seconds," I said.
He held me for thirty more.
***
"You're going to have to wear my stuff," Liam said, tossing me a gray Riverside crew t-shirt. It was a little loose across the shoulders when I pulled it on. The joggers fit perfectly.