Chapter 17
Tyler ordered for the whole table without asking anyone.
"Four lasagnas, three of the big spaghetti, the chicken parm, and whatever that is." He pointed at a menu he hadn't read. "And breadsticks. All of them. I know what rowers need and it's carbs!"
The waitress looked at him. "All of them is a lot of breadsticks."
"Then you understand the assignment."
The Riverside Club hadn't changed. Brick walls, the downtown side street out the windows, long tables, mismatched chairs, the walls crowded with framed crew composites going back to the seventies.
Jace was at the head and the team was packed in shoulder to shoulder, loud, steam coming off the radiator in the corner, the windows fogged against the cold. All of us crammed in.
And Alex, sitting next to me, in my hoodie. My doubles partner and my boyfriend.
This same room that nearly ended us, and now we were together in public, and no one here seemed to have a problem with it.
It was still uncomfortable thinking that everyone here knew that we were together.
I'm sure the thought crossed their mind that me and Alex, two guys, were having sex.
But I couldn't change their thoughts, just learn to be comfortable with them.
A couple of the guys clocked him when he sat down. I saw it. The half-second double-take — that's the Kingswell guy, that's the photo guy. One or two looks held a beat too long. But that was it. Nobody said anything bad.
The food came and we began eating.
Then Tyler started it. Tyler always started it.
"Okay, I have to say it." He pointed a breadstick at Alex. "You two realize you've both decked the same guy? At different times." He looked around for support. "Marcus Caldwell has now been punched by both halves of this couple. That's a stat. That goes on a banner."
"The party," Remy said, tipping his cup at me.
"He had it coming," I said.
"And then the library," Tyler was building now. "Harrington broke his nose. In a library. Over a guy." He pressed a hand to his chest. "It's the most romantic thing I've ever heard."
"He called you a slur, Remy," Alex said. Quiet. Not joking.
The table dipped a half-beat. Remy held his eyes across the table.
"Yeah," Remy said. "He did." A pause, then dry as ever: "Which is exactly why you're both going on the banner. Took two schools and two separate occasions, but somebody finally—"
"No banner," Jace said from the head of the table, not looking up from his plate.
"There's gonna be a banner," Tyler said.
"And he drove here in the BMW," Tyler went on, undeterred. "Everyone see the beamer? It's got a little hood ornament that looks down on us."
"It's a lease," Alex said.
"Oh, a lease." Tyler clutched his chest like he'd been shot. "He's one of us after all."
That got the table, and Alex took it — gave it back, even, something dry I half-caught about Tyler's relationship with carbs — and I watched him do the thing I'd never seen him do in a room with other rowers.
He relaxed. He wasn't like this with the Kingswell guys, not from what I had ever seen, the Harrington mask was still on.
But here, now, he was just himself — Alex.
Then Remy set his fork down, and his voice shifted. "Real question, though. What happens with the quad?"
The table half-quieted. It was the thing nobody had said out loud all night. The boat that had clicked. Me at stroke, Tyler, Braden, Alex in bow, Remy calling it.
"I'm out through the end of the semester," Alex said. "Can't touch a boat till January."
"And then?" Remy said.
"And then I'm back. But I don't know about the joint program."
Evan looked up from his plate. He'd been quiet, eating, taking it all in the way freshmen do.
"You should just row for us," he said. Simple. Like it was the most obvious thing in the world. "Who needs Kingswell? And we actually like you." He shrugged and went back to his pasta. "Just saying."
Nobody turned it into a joke, which was the strange part. Remy and I caught eyes down the table. Even Tyler opened his mouth and, for once, shut it again.
Because the kid had just said something that made no sense. Alex Harrington, legacy, Kingswell down to the bone, in a Riverside boat for real and that, for one second, sounded like the most obvious idea anyone had had all year.
Alex didn't answer. But he didn't laugh it off either. He just looked at his plate a second, something working behind his eyes.
Jace let the noise roll on a while after that.
The stories, Tyler doing an impression of Evan's catch that was cruel and accurate, somebody relitigating a call from the Charles.
He sat at the head with his arms crossed and a small smile he was trying to hide, watching four years of his life make noise around him one last time.
Then he tapped his glass with a fork and everyone settled down. He stood up.
"I'm not doing a speech," he said.
"You're standing up," Tyler said. "That's a speech."
"Shut up, Tyler."
Jace looked around the table.
"I came here because nobody else wanted me," he said.
"Four years ago. No offers, no money, a coach at a directional school who told me to take up wrestling.
Hale was the only one who called." He let that sit.
"And four years later I'm leaving because everybody wants me. So." A shrug. "Funny how that works."
Nobody laughed. It wasn't a joke.
"This program isn't supposed to win. We don't have the money.
We don't have the boathouse or the donors or even the trophy that's supposed to be in that case down there.
Kingswell thinks they know what we are." His jaw set.
"Don't ever let them be right about that.
We've been better than them the whole time, on no budget, in boats held together with tape.
Remember that when it's hard. Especially when it's hard. "
Then he looked at me.
Just me. Straight down the table, past Tyler, Evan, Remy, and the empty bread baskets, and the look landed on me like a weight set down on my chest, and I knew what was coming before he said it.
"Moore. You're the guy now." A beat. "Don't screw it up."
That was it. That was the whole handoff. Four years of a program, the thing he'd built out of nothing because nobody wanted either of us, passed down a table in a few words and a look.
"Inspirational," Tyler said into the silence.
"Shut up, Tyler," Alex said.
The table cracked up, and the moment broke the way Jace wanted it to break, back into noise and chaos. But it stayed in me. It sat there the rest of the meal, underneath the laughing, heavy and warm at the same time.
Because here's the thing nobody would ever understand about Jace.
He was me. He showed up here with nothing, a scholarship kid nobody wanted, and instead of keeping his head down he led — quiet, no speeches, just showing up before everyone and leaving after, until a whole program would go silent when he tapped a fork.
I'd been watching him do it for years and telling myself I was just watching.
I wasn't. I was learning it. And now he was handing it to me and walking out the door, and the boathouse was going to be mine, and I didn't feel ready.
I felt like a kid who'd been handed something he was going to drop.
You'll drop it, the old voice said.
Maybe. But Jace didn't think so. And Jace didn't say things he didn't mean.
***
We peeled off from the pack at the corner — the rest of them heading for the dorms, Tyler still going on about the banner — and it was just me and Alex, walking the long way down toward the river.
Neither of us said where we were going. We were going to my room.
We both knew it. Neither of us said that either.
"So," I said. "How was that?"
"That was…" He hunted for it. "I don't actually have a word."
"Tyler's a lot."
"Tyler wants to put my face on a banner. For assault."
"He'll forget by Monday."
He huffed a laugh, fogging the air, and we walked a while before I said the thing I was actually thinking.
"It was kind of crazy, though. Right?" Quieter. "We just sat there. At a team dinner. As boyfriends. In a room full of people who all knew, and nobody…" I shook my head. "Nobody cared."
"I keep waiting for the part where it goes wrong," Alex said.
"Yeah. Me too." I glanced at him. "It didn't, though."
"No." He sounded almost suspicious of it. "It didn't."
We came up to where the path breaks toward the boathouse.
And I let myself feel a thing I didn't usually let myself feel, which is that maybe this pans out.
Not all of it. His dad was still out there.
Christmas was coming, the whole machine.
But this part — us — maybe this part was actually going to be okay.
I didn't say it. I just let it sit in me for a second, warm against the cold.
"You know Evan was serious," I said. "About rowing for us."
"Evan's a freshman."
"But he might not be wrong." I bumped his shoulder. "I'm just saying. Riverside could use a bow seat who sits the boat down. Remy said so himself."
"That quad was a good boat."
"It's because of us you know," I said. "We're a good pair."
Alex looked up at me, his blue eyes shimmering from the light across the river. "Yeah we are Liam."
I grinned that stupid grin. "I can picture it now. Golden boy in a duct-taped single. Your whole family tree would wither in the first week."
Alex laughed. "It sure would. I'd be a traitor."
I put my arm around him. "A very sexy traitor."
He was smiling. "Thanks."
When we came down the hill, past the boathouse, I saw a figure at the end of the dock. Alone, a travel mug in one hand, looking out at the water the. Hale didn't go home. He ran on coffee and river water and a lifetime of being the first one in and the last one out.
"Is that you Moore? Harrington?"
"Yeah coach, it's us," I said.
Alex's hand touched my back. "I'll be over here," he said, and drifted off toward the boat racks, giving us the dock.
I walked out to him with my gut climbing up into my throat.
Because I knew what this was. Every other time I'd walked out to Hale on a dock it had been about a piece, or my mouth, or my temper — something I'd done in a boat.
Not this. This was the first time I'd faced him since a photo of me kissing Alex went out.
Since the whole school found out the scholarship kid was bi, tangled up with a Harrington, sitting right in the middle of the ugliest mess either program had seen in years.
And Hale hadn't said a word about it. Not one. A solid week of nothing from the one man whose opinion decided whether I had a future in this sport at all.
My whole body was braced for it.
He studied me a while before he talked. Read me like the current.
"Jace hands off his records this week. Rosters, the winter program. You've shadowed him the last few weeks. January it's yours, the whole operation, through the end of the season. We'll call it interim team captain."
"Okay." Relief flooded through me. He wouldn't have done that if he cared about my sexuality.
"You like guys Liam," he said like he was telling me what I was.
I nodded.
"I don't care." He turned and looked at me, flat, even, the most ordinary voice in the world.
"But people have other opinions in this sport.
It's not always going to be easy. And the fact that you're shacking up with a Harrington.
" A beat. "Only makes it more complicated.
But it doesn't change the work you put in.
You row, you lead, you show up at six. That's it. "
I stood there in the cold and couldn't get a word out. Because that was it. That was the thing I'd been terrified of for months — that the man whose word decided my scholarship and my future would decide I was a liability the program couldn't carry.
"Yes, Coach," I managed.
"You're not ready," he said, turning back to the river, because Hale never let you keep it clean.
"Twenty years old, chip the size of the launch, hot-headed.
But you're in the right direction, and the team needs you to get there fast." Another sip.
"And Moore. Can you and your boyfriend stop hitting Kingswell students? "
I smirked. "No more fighting."
Coach Hale nodded. "Now go on. Your boy's freezing by the racks."
"Six AM," I said.
"Don't be late." He'd already turned back to the water.
I found Alex by the boat racks, hands jammed in the hoodie, breath clouding.
"Well?" he said.
"I didn't lose my scholarship and I'm interim Captain"
Alex leaned into me and wrapped his arms around me. "I'm so proud of you."
I felt the warm of him against my body, his heart beating against mine. For a moment, it felt like everything was going in our favor, because it was. Half the fears we had didn't come true and the other half… yet to be determined.
"He did say one thing," I said.
Alex pulled away. "What?"
"We have to stop getting into fights with Kingswell students."
"That's fair. I think we have better things to do." Alex winked.
"Oh do we?"
Alex nodded. "Let's go."
We turned and walked toward my room, the river loud behind us and Kingswell's lights sitting across the water on the far side, the other side, where they could stay.