"I was going to..." His voice was quiet. "I should have said something before the meeting. Before you had to hear it like that. I'm sorry."
The apology caught me off guard. I'd walked into this ready for a fight—ready for him to get defensive, throw up walls, tell me it was none of my business. I had responses prepared for all of that.
I didn't have a response for sorry.
"That was shitty. You deserved better than finding out in a room full of people."
"Then why didn't you tell me?"
"Because I didn't know how." He ran his hand through his hair. "Because every time I tried to figure out what to say, I couldn't make the words work. Because I'm trying to figure my shit out and I keep making the wrong calls." He looked at me. "I'm trying to do the right thing, Alex. With Emily. With school. With my future."
"And I'm not the right thing."
The words came out quieter than I expected.
"I didn't say that—"
"You didn't have to." I set down my own rag. Faced him fully. "You were in my bed on Saturday. And by Wednesday you were bringing her to a team event. You didn't even pause, Liam. Didn't think maybe I should know first."
He flinched. Actually flinched.
"I know," he said. "I know how that looks."
"It's not how it looks. It's what it is. I'm the thing you do in the dark, and she's the thing you do in public."
"That's not—" His jaw tightened. "That's not fair."
"Isn't it?"
"You have no idea what it's like." He stepped closer. His voice dropping—raw, honest, walls crumbling the way they only did with me. "You get to go back to your legacy. Your trust fund. Your family name that opens every door. I have a scholarship. One fuck-up and I lose everything I've worked for. I can't just—I can't afford to want the wrong things."
"The wrong things." I repeated it back to him. Let it sit between us. Let him hear what he'd just said. "Is that what I am? The wrong thing?"
Something crossed his face—shame, maybe. Or the recognition that the words had landed exactly the way they sounded.
"That's not what I meant—"
"Then what did you mean? Because from where I'm standing, we had sex on Saturday and went back to your girlfriend on Monday and didn't even have the decency to—"
"I didn't plan it!" His voice rose. "I didn't go back to her because I wanted to erase you. I went back because—" He stopped. Breathed. Looked at the floor. "Because I hurt her and I was trying to make it better. And she isn't a risk."
The honesty of it winded me. Not because it was cruel—because it wasn't. It was just true. And the truth was worse than cruelty.
"You don't get it," he said. "The pressure. The stakes."
"I don't get the pressure?" Everything I'd been holding snapped. "My father was in Eldridge's office this week, Liam. I heard him. Through the door."
Liam went still. "What?"
"He found out we were paired. And he told Eldridge to pull us apart."
"He—what?"
"He called you a charity case." It tasted like poison. "Said he wouldn't have his son rowing with 'some scholarship kid who thinks this program is his ticket to legitimacy.'"
Liam's face drained. I watched the color leave—watched him absorb the specific shape of my father's contempt. Not the vague idea that Thomas Harrington disapproved. The actual words. The weight of them.
"He said that."
