I changed in the locker room—shorts, tank top, beat-up Nikes—and left my stuff on the metal bench by my locker.
Back upstairs, I picked the erg near Remy. Usually, I'd be halfway across the room, but I didn't trust myself to be that alone.
I strapped my feet in. Grabbed the handle. Set the damper to seven.
Didn't pull.
Just sat there. Hands gripping the handle. Staring at the blank performance monitor.
Bisexuality is a valid orientation. Not a phase. Not confusion.
I pulled. Hard. The flywheel screamed to life and the chain rattled through the housing.
First ten strokes were garbage. All arms, no legs, the kind of form that would've earned me a week of technique drills if Hale saw it. I didn't care. I just needed the noise in my skull to quiet down.
It didn't.
You can't choose who you're attracted to any more than you can choose your eye color.
Harder. The monitor flickered — 1:38 split, 1:35, 1:33. Race pace. Stupid for a random Tuesday when I had a scrimmage in two days, but my body was running on something that wasn't logic.
What can change is awareness. Acceptance. Willingness to acknowledge what's always been there.
Always been there.
"You're going to blow out your lower back pulling like that."
I eased off. Let the split climb back to something sane. My lungs were already scorched from the sprint.
I rowed at steady state for a few minutes. The rhythm helped—legs, back, arms, arms, back, legs. Repetitive enough to dull the edges. Through the windows along the far wall I could see the river, grey-brown in the late morning light, a single sculler from the community program cutting a line through the flat water.
"What are you watching?" I asked. Because silence was worse.
"Footage from Monday." Remy tilted his laptop screen toward me without getting up. "Coaches want me to pull pacing data on the doubles before Thursday."
Monday.
My hands tightened on the erg handle.
On his screen, a launch-cam wide shot—the river, a double moving through the frame left to right. Two rowers in near-perfect symmetry. Catches landing together. Bodies moving in mirror. The boat running so clean it barely left a wake.
Me and Alex.
I stopped pulling. The flywheel wound down with a low whine.
"That's you and Alex," Remy said.
"I can see that."
He tapped his trackpad. Rewound. Played it again, slower this time. The boat glided through the frame and I watched my own back—the drive phase, legs pushing, body swinging open—and behind me, Alex matching it exactly. Not following. Matching.Like he was inside my nervous system, reading each stroke before I finished it.
"Watch the catch here." Remy pointed. Rewound three seconds. Slow motion. Both blades entering at the same angle, same depth, same fraction of a second. "You can't coach that. That's not technique—that's something else."
I didn't answer because I knew what it was.
"And this—" He scrubbed forward in the timeline. "Power ten at the twelve hundred. Your boat speed jumps from 4:02 pace to 3:48 in three strokes." He looked up at me. "Three strokes, Liam. That's a fourteen-second split drop. I've coxed boats for three years, and I've never seen that from a doubles pair on their first row together."
"It was a good session," I said.
