Chapter 15
Alex
Back. You up?
I looked at the phone for a while before I answered. I had so much to say to Alex and I couldn't wait to see him again.
Liam
Bridge. Ten min.
Alex
See you soon.
I sat on the edge of my bed and put my shoes on slow, one lace at a time. Because as badly as I wanted to see Alex, I was still scared of what he could say but even more so I was scared of what I knew I needed to say to him.
I hadn't answered Alex once all weekend. I'd told myself it was respect — he was in Vermont doing the thing he needed to do with Ethan and I wasn't going to be the needy one blowing up his phone while he figured out his life. That was the story I'd run, even if it was half true.
I crossed the quad, the trees stripped down to black against a sky that had already gone dark at six. The river got louder before I could see it and the days of rain had it running high and fast, the kind of current that takes an oar if you're stupid with it.
The footbridge.
He was standing in the middle of it. Hands in his pockets. And I stopped at the Riverside end and just looked at him for a second, because something was off and I needed to find out what before I got close enough for him to read me.
It took me a second to place it.
The mask was gone.
Last time I saw him — his dorm, the lamp, the quarter-zip and the smooth composed face I hadn't seen in a week — he'd had it all bolted back on.
Now he didn't. He looked tired and cold and like himself.
Like the version of him that brought bagels to a hidden bench and let me fix his zipper.
Whatever happened in Vermont had taken the armor off and not put it back.
That's a trick, the voice in me said.
I told it to shut up.
I walked out onto the bridge.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey."
We stood there. The river underneath us doing what water does. Both campuses lit up on either side. Kingswell's stone towers behind him, Riverside's flat concrete behind me, and us in the middle on the thing that connected the two worlds that weren't supposed to connect.
"You didn't text back," he said. Not an accusation. Just a fact set down between us.
"No."
"All weekend."
"No."
He nodded like that meant something to him, which it probably did. He didn't push it.
"Can we not do this on the bridge?" he said. "It's freezing and the river's loud and I can't. I need to be able to hear you."
"Yeah."
We walked. Off the river path, through the gap in the birch trees and the overgrown holly, back to the bench nobody knew about.
We sat. The bench was small. Our legs touched. Neither of us moved.
He took a breath. Opened his mouth. "So. Here's what I've been—"
"No."
He stopped.
"I go first," I said. "And whatever you came back with, I don't want to hear it yet. Because what I've got to say can't depend on it. I've been reacting this whole time."
He closed his mouth. Sat back. Waited.
I'd rehearsed this. Two days in the boat, in the dining hall, lying in the dark with the whale sounds off. I'd had whole speeches. And now my mouth was dry and none of the rehearsed lines would come, so I just started, raw, wherever it came out.
"When I was a kid my dad left. But what actually fucked me up…" I couldn't believe I was telling him this, I paused and my chest started beating harder. I couldn't look at him in the eyes but I felt him lean in closer.
I took a deep breath.
"He said he wasn't going to. Sat at the kitchen table the week before and told me, straight to my face, that everything was fine. And then he left a week later. Gone."
As I said the word, I could see the scenes pass through my mind. My dads face. The headlights. Then that feeling of emptiness and the pressure behind my eyes.
"People say they'll be there and then they aren't."
I ran my hands over my face.
"And then you," I said. "End of summer before freshman year — gone. The morning after the party — you called me a mistake. Twice. You pulled away twice and both times it was like… this again."
His jaw moved. He wanted to defend it.
"So when you sat in a room and agreed to end us." I shook my head. "That wasn't new to me."
The cold was in my teeth. I kept going because if I stopped I wouldn't start again.
"Here's the thing though." I turned and looked at him. "I'm done."
The look on his face crumpled.
"Not done with you. I'm done waiting and being scared." I swallowed.
His face shift again from defeat to curiosity, his eyebrow ticking up in the way it did.
"I'm done waiting to be chosen. I spent the other night at dinner trying to say what we have isn't a relationship."
"Liam—"
"Let me finish or I won't get there." I breathed. "I'm done pretending this is nothing. I don't want to call it nothing anymore. I want it to be real. I want you. That's it. So whatever you have to say… it better be a good plan. Because leaving me isn't an option."
The trees ticked in the wind. The river kept on under everything.
"So now you can tell me," I said. "Whatever you came back with."
He was quiet for a long moment.
Then he laughed, a short, awkward sound, almost nothing, his breath catching on the way out.
"I don't have a plan."
The voice in me went there it is before I could stop it. I felt my face start to close.
He saw it. Caught my wrist before the wall finished going up.
"No. Listen to me." His hand stayed on my wrist. "I tried. The whole drive up and back. And I sat there looking for the version where I keep you and keep all of it. The money, the name, the future, the family. The one where nobody loses anything."
His thumb moved once against the inside of my wrist.
"It doesn't exist, Liam. He built it so it doesn't exist. There's no third door.
There's the door where I lose you and the door where I lose everything else, and that's it, that's the whole house, and he's the one who drew it.
" He let out a breath. "So I stopped looking for a plan.
Because that was just another way of trying not to choose. "
"Alex?"
"I called him and I told him no."
The river. The wind. My heart doing something stupid in my chest.
"I told him I'm not taking the deal." His voice didn't shake. It was just steady. "I told him I'm gay and I'm with you and if that costs me everything, then it costs me everything. And then I stopped talking and waited."
"What'd he say?"
"Nothing. Fucking nothing." Alex looked at the dark between the trees. "He hung up. Didn't say one word. Just — gone. Quietest he's ever been with me in my life."
I should have felt relief. Mostly I did. But underneath it something cold moved, because I knew what it felt like to be abandoned by a father.
"I'm sorry Alex."
His eyes got wet. "No. It's okay. It's his choice. Not mine," he said, voice cracking. "I don't know what's going to happen but I know I have you. And that's what really matters."
He'd done it without telling me. He'd done it not knowing if I'd even still be here when he got back.
I'd spent the whole weekend going silent to protect myself, and the entire time, two hundred miles north, he'd been burning down his own life on the chance that I'd be standing at the bridge when he got home.
We'd both jumped. Neither of us knowing the other one had.
"I've been choosing you the whole time," he said.
"I know it didn't look like it. I know the okay looked like the opposite.
But I chose you when I walked across that bridge with blood on my face.
I chose you on the dock at Brackett Lake when I kissed you.
I've been choosing you since I was eighteen and too scared to say it out loud.
" He shrugged, helpless. "I'm just done being too scared now.
That's the only thing that changed. I ran out of scared. "
My throat had gone tight and useless both of our eyes starting to tear up.
I leaned in and I kissed him.
On the bench. The hidden one. The one that used to be a secret because we were a secret, and wasn't anymore, because we weren't. His mouth cold and then not cold.
His hand coming up to the side of my face the way it did at the lake the first time, the touch that he said was the moment he knew.
The world going on around us and neither of us flinching, because there was no one to flinch for, and there never would be again.
When we broke apart his forehead came down against mine. We breathed. The cold made clouds between us.
"So," I said. My voice came out rougher than I meant. "We're doing this. For real."
"Yeah."
"Out loud. All of it. No bench-in-the-dark, no five a.m., no driving an hour away so nobody sees."
"Yeah."
I pulled back enough to look at him. The bruise on his jaw was almost gone now, just a yellow shadow. The thing he got defending us.
"Then say it," I said. "What you are."
He huffed a laugh. "You want me to—"
"Say it."
He looked at me. Steady. Not a crack in it.
"I'm your boyfriend."
The word landed somewhere in the middle of my chest and stayed there. The idea I'd choked on just a few days ago. The word I'd been too much of a coward to put on the truest thing in my life.
And it was mine now. Ours.
"Yeah," I said. And then, because it was getting too heavy and I needed somewhere to put the weight, "Took you long enough, golden boy."
He laughed. I felt it more than heard it, his shoulder against mine, his leg against my leg, the small bench holding two people who'd spent three months pretending it could only hold one.
We sat there a while. Didn't say much. There wasn't much left to say that words were good for.
It wasn't fixed. I knew that even then, with his hand warm in mine and the cold trying to get through my jacket.
The hearing was tomorrow. He'd sit in a room in front of the dean and the lawyers and probably his father, one way or another, and they'd decide whether he got to stay at Kingswell or got thrown out for the crime of hitting the guy who'd spent months hunting us.
None of that was solved. None of it was even close.
But this part was. This one thing on the whole board had stopped moving. He was my boyfriend. He'd said the word. And whatever came tomorrow, it was coming at the two of us, not at me alone at a window watching the headlights go.
"It's freezing," Alex said into my shoulder.
"Yeah."
"I don't care."
"Me neither." I tightened my hand around his. "Five more minutes."
The river ran high and loud in the dark. Both campuses burned on either side of it. And between them, on a bench nobody knew about, two terrified idiots who'd both already jumped sat in the cold and stayed.