The boat held under me this time. The water didn’t punish me for thinking too hard. It carried me—steady, smooth, patient.
And with each stroke I tried to picture tomorrow.
Alex across from me in a matching single. His face sharp with focus. His rhythm clean, powerful, familiar in a way that still unnerved me.
I had lost to him once in secret, before the season even started. But tomorrow there would be no hiding and everyone would see.
As I rowed, my breath evened out, my blades settling into a steadier rhythm. Something else pushed up inside me, something heavier than the idea of losing to Alex.
I’d spent all of freshman year pretending that summer had burned itself out. That whatever flared between us on Brackett Lake was a phase, a mistake, something distance would dissolve over time. But it wasn’t just the way I felt about Alex—it was what those feelings meant.
Liking a guy wasn’t supposed to be part of my story. I wasn’t gay. At least, that’s what I kept telling myself. I liked Emily. I liked girls. She turned me on.
But fuck, the fact that I still had feelings for Alex. That I still checked out guys. That I was jacking off to Alex last night. That was the part I never knew how to deal with—the part I kept trying to row away from, stroke after stroke.
On the next drive, I realized, this wasn’t over. No amount of time, rowing, ignoring would make these feelings go away. Nothing about my attraction to guys or Alex Harrington had ever been over.
And tomorrow I had to face him—not as the boy from the marina, not as the mistake I pretended I’d buried, but as my rival.
The person I had to outpull, outsprint, outmuscle.
Doing battle with the past.
I swallowed hard. My throat tightened. Not from exertion but from the pressure of everything I wouldn’t let myself say. Everything I refused to even name.
I took another stroke. Then another. The rhythm steadied. The boat held beneath me.
I wasn’t ready, but it didn’t matter.
It was coming. Alex was coming.
Chapter 12: Alex
Tomorrow was race day.
The pressure around me felt like it had been simmering since the start of the semester—my father’s expectations, the weight of schoolwork piling up, all the chaos that had already unfolded in the first days of sophomore year.
Surprisingly, one thing wasn’t bothering me at all: whether I could beat Liam. I had already done it, and I knew I could do it again in front of everyone.
The real question, the one I couldn’t escape no matter how many meters I rowed, was what it would mean if I did. What it would mean for him, for me, for whatever existed between us.
There was no “me and him.” Not in any world that mattered.
Only rivals—never anything else.
Coach Eldridge had the launch idling a few meters off my stern, the low hum vibrating through the morning stillness. The river was flat enough that I could see my reflection between strokes—jaw set, shoulders square, trying to look like the version of myself he wanted to see. The same version my father expected.
“Alex,” Eldridge called, calm as ever. “You’re rushing the slide.”
I exhaled and reset. Legs down, finish through the arms, tap out clean, feather, hands away, body over, then slide.
He taught it to us like a religion: sequence, discipline, inevitability.
“My hands just—“
“Your hands followed the thought, not the stroke.” He eased the launch closer. “Again. Keep your weight off the seat. Let the boat run.”
I focused on the feeling he always talked about—the shell gliding under me instead of me forcing it.
