Chapter 21
A&P was the one I was actually good at. Other people sweated it.
To me it just made sense. How a muscle fires, how a joint takes load, how the whole machine of a body holds together and moves.
Same as a boat. Either it works or it doesn't, and it tells you which.
After a semester where nothing went the way it was supposed to, there was something almost funny about sitting down to the one thing that held still long enough to study.
Outside, the campus was half-gone. Trunks open in the lots, kids hauling duffels, the dining hall near empty. By the weekend I'd be on a bus home.
I got back to the room and Noah was already half-packed, suitcase open on his stripped bed, his whole side of the room dismantled down to the cinderblock.
Noah didn't own much. A poly-sci's major's worth of paperbacks with cracked spines, a coffee maker that had no business being as loud as it was, and the dock for his phone with the whale sounds app he'd played every single night since September.
He was jamming books into a duffel like they'd personally wronged him.
"You're going today?" I dropped my bag. "Thought it was tomorrow."
"Priya's catching a ride home and there's room. They're dropping me on the way." He shoved another book in. "I'm not paying for Amtrak when carpooling exists."
"Good call."
He zipped the duffel, stood, and looked around the half-empty room, and for a second neither of us said anything, because the room had that end-of-semester look like a place that had held something and was about to let go of it.
I'm bad at this. I want it on the record.
I can take a boat through a headwind, I can run a practice, I can stand on a dock and tell a freshman he belongs.
But I cannot, to save my life, say a real thing to a person I care about who's standing three feet in front of me.
It locks up somewhere under my sternum. Always has.
"So," I said.
"So," Noah said.
"This was a semester."
"It was a semester." He huffed. "You came out, your boyfriend got arrested by UP, and I helped you wipe a video that could've ended your whole career. My mother thinks I spent the semester reading Kant."
"You did read Kant."
"In the cracks. Between your crises." He sat down on the bare mattress, and the smart-ass slid off his face the way it did maybe twice a year, when he actually meant something. "You good? Actually."
And there it was — the thing about Noah.
He never flinched. Not once, all semester.
The night Alex showed up at our door shaking with blood on his face, Noah looked up from his book, read the room in about a second, and got up and walked out so we could have it.
No questions. No speech. Didn't make it weird.
He watched me fall apart and fall in love in the space of a few months, and the only thing he ever said about it was that's not weird, that's Tuesday.
The whole campus was looking at me like a headline, and Noah just kept looking at me like a roommate.
"Yeah," I said. "I'm good. Genuinely. First time in a long time."
"Good." He nodded once, like he was checking a box.
"Because for what it's worth — and I've actually thought about this, so it's worth something — you spent two years acting like the best thing that could happen to you was nobody noticing you existed.
And then everybody noticed, all at once, in the worst possible way.
" He shrugged. "And you're still standing.
Better than standing. You run the place now. "
I wanted to bat it away, I felt the joke load up and I didn't say it.
"That means a lot coming from you," I said instead. It came out rough. "You're the first person who ever just… let me be whatever I was, without needing it to be anything. I didn't have that before you. I didn't know I was allowed to."
Noah blinked. I'd surprised him. I'd surprised myself.
"Huh," he said. "Look at you. Using your words."
"Don't make it weird."
"You made it weird. I was being normal." But his voice had gone thick, and he covered it by standing up off the bed, sticking out his hand, and pulling me into the rough one-armed hug thing that guys do. "Take care of yourself, Liam. And tell Alex good luck at the lake."
"I'll tell him." I held on a beat longer than I meant to. "Thanks, Noah. For all of it."
"That's what the rent's for." He grabbed the duffel, then paused at the nightstand, reached for the whale sounds headphone dock — and set it back down. "Keep it. You sleep better with it than I do."
"I don't need—"
"You snore less. It's documented." He grinned from the doorway. "See you in January, Captain."
Then he was gone.
I sat on my bed about a minute. The whale dock blinking on the empty nightstand across from me.
Then I couldn't sit in it anymore. So I didn't. My feet took me the other way, down toward the river, and I let myself into the boathouse with the key Hale had handed me last week.
It was empty.
I'd never been in here alone like this. No practice on the board, the launch bay doors pulled shut against the cold, the ergs sitting silent in their rows.
Outside the doors the river ran fast and full, loud with two days of December rain.
The shells were racked and covered, the oars stacked, everything squared away for the break.
A place that's usually all noise, gone dead quiet.
I sat down on the nearest erg and just looked at it for a while. The whole room.
Up on the whiteboard in the corner, in Jace's blocky handwriting, the last lineup he ever set was still there.
Nobody'd erased it. His locker by the door was already cleaned out, the name gone off the front, but the board still had him in the stroke seat of a boat that didn't exist anymore.
I figured somebody forgot to wipe it. Or didn't want to.
Jace was gone. Graduated Friday, gone to the development camp in January. He'd shaped this whole program out of scraps and a bad attitude, and now it was mine.
I didn't feel ready. That was the truth, sitting there.
In September I'd walked into this building a sophomore with a chip on my shoulder and a secret eating me alive.
Kept my head down, my mouth shut, my whole self locked in a box because I was sure that if anybody saw the real thing they'd take the only good I had — the rowing, the scholarship, the way out for me and my mom.
Now it was December. The secret was out, blown wide open, and the world hadn't ended.
Jace was gone, Hale had handed me the keys, and the boathouse was mine.
And I was twenty years old and supposed to hold together a team. And what would next semester bring? Back in a single? The quad? What about Alex? I let it go before my thoughts started to spiral. Not today's problem.
I felt like a kid who'd been handed something heavy and was going to drop it.
But then I thought about how I got here.
Because I didn't get here on my own. That was the thing the kid at the window never figured out, that needing people wasn't the trap I'd always thought it was.
My mom worked doubles at the diner for fifteen years so I could afford a rich kid's sport, and never once made me feel the weight of it.
Jace looked at a furious broke nineteen-year-old and saw a stroke seat instead of a problem.
Noah never once flinched — not the whole year, right up to the door he just walked out of.
Remy was right there all along. And Hale set my biggest fear down on a dock like it weighed nothing. You row. You lead. You show up.
And Alex. Golden boy, Alex. The boy who crossed the river in the dark and turned up at my door with blood on his face. Who said it's always been you like it was the most obvious fact in the world, like he couldn't believe I needed telling.
I'd been carried this whole time. It just took a while to see it.
On my way out I stopped at the case by the door.
The glass one, with the old team photos and a couple of minor plaques — and the gap.
The dark shelf in the middle where the championship trophy should've been, the stolen one nobody had seen in decades, the boathouse ghost story Tyler had been telling since I was a freshman.
I looked at it a second. Didn't feel Tyler's anger about it, didn't feel Jace's old grudge. Just saw it for what it was. An empty space. A thing that was missing that didn't have to stay missing.
Someday, I thought, and was a little surprised I meant it.
I hit the lights, and the boathouse went dark behind me, and I pushed out through the bay doors onto the dock.
The cold off the river hit me clean. I pulled my jacket tight and called my mom.
She picked up on the second ring, the way she always does, like she'd been holding the phone.
"I'm done," I said. "Finals. All of them."
"Oh, thank God. How'd you do?"
"Good, I think. A&P was solid."
"That's my boy." I could hear the smile. "When are you coming home?"
"Friday. Bus gets in at four."
"I'll be there." No hesitation. There never is, with her. Then, lighter, careful underneath it: "And Liam, is that boy of yours coming to the lake for Christmas?"
"Not sure."
She was quiet a beat. I couldn't believe she asked like it was the most normal thing in the world.
"You tell him he's welcome at our place. Anytime." A pause. "I mean that, Liam."
"I know you do, Mom."
"Now go get warm. You sound like you're standing in the wind."
I smirked.
"Friday. Four o'clock. Love you," she said.
"Love you too."
I stayed out there a minute after she hung up.
The river ran in front of me, high and fast and black. On either side of it, both campuses lit up against the early dark — Riverside on the left, low and broke and mine, Kingswell on the right, all stone and money. The footbridge strung between them with its lamps coming on.
Come January I'd be the one running the morning sessions. Setting the lineups, working the freshmen too hard the way Hale promised I would. I didn't know exactly what was coming for the boat — the quad had clicked exactly once before it lost Alex to the suspension.
A lot of it was up in the air. But the seat Jace left was mine now whether I felt ready or not, and here's what I kept circling back to: this had been the best year of rowing in my life.
Fourth at the Head of the Charles — the first time our program cracked the top five in decades.
My splits lower than they'd ever been. A whole season where the boat just kept getting faster every time we put it on the water.
And I'd do it because Jace said you're the guy now. Because Hale said don't be late. Because my mom worked doubles for fifteen years and never asked for anything but for me to be happy. Because Alex crossed a bridge with blood on his face and chose me over everything he had.
I'd do it because I was Liam Moore.
Scholarship kid. Captain-in-waiting. Bisexual. Rower. Boyfriend. Son.
All of it. At once. Out loud. No box, no lock, nothing buried anymore.
I walked up off the dock and headed home through the December dark, the boathouse black behind me, and finally… nothing was chasing me.