"We don't talk about the rest of it," Liam said. "Not until after Thursday. This is our career on the line."
"Okay."
"I mean it, Alex. Whatever this is—we park it. We row."
"Okay."
He held my gaze one more second. Then turned and walked toward the locker room.
I stood alone in the hallway and let the weight settle.
Our career.
Liam Moore and Alex Harrington.
Thursday. Four days. Two thousand meters.
We'd figure out the rest after.
If there was anything left to figure out.
Chapter 13: Liam
The lecture hall was one of those tiered rooms where you sat in rows that climbed toward the back, looking down at the professor like you were in an amphitheater. Anatomy and Physiology. Tuesday morning. 10 AM.
I usually sat in the middle—not too eager, not too checked out. Today I was in my normal spot, notebook open, pen in hand, trying to focus.
But I couldn't stop thinking about yesterday.
The boat rack. Alex pressed against it, fiberglass shells rattling above us. His hands fisted in my shirt. The sound he'd made when we pushed together. Our bodies touching like they were meant to be together.
The memory sat in my body like a live wire. Not arousal exactly—something deeper. The awareness that I'd kissed someone and felt more in thirty seconds than I'd felt on a whole date with Emily. I mean she had her hands all over me and I felt nothing.
Professor Chen was talking about human reproduction. We'd been on this unit for a week—reproductive systems, hormones, biological processes.
Then she clicked to a new slide.
Human Sexuality and Sexual Orientation
My stomach dropped.
Seriously?
"Sexual orientation," Professor Chen said, walking across the front of the room, "is a complex interplay of biological, psychological, and social factors. For many years, Western medicine treated heterosexuality as the default and everything else as deviation. We now understand that's not only inaccurate—it's harmful."
She clicked to the next slide. The Kinsey Scale. A gradient from 0 to 6, exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual, with everything in between.
"Alfred Kinsey's research in the 1940s and 50s challenged the binary understanding of sexuality," she continued. "His scale proposed that sexual orientation exists on a spectrum. Most people aren't exclusively one thing or another. They fall somewhere in between."
My heart started hammering.
I looked around the room. Everyone else was taking notes like this was normal. Just another lecture. Another set of facts to memorize for the exam. A girl in the front row was highlighting something in her textbook. The guy next to me was checking his phone under his desk.
Nobody's world was being rearranged.
Just mine.
My hand wasn't moving. The pen sat motionless against the notebook page. I stared at the slide—that clean gradient, 0 to 6, like you could plot a human life on a simple scale.
