"Sorry," he murmured. "Tired."
"It's okay."
He looked at me. Green eyes half-lidded. The exhaustion making everything softer—his face, his voice, the walls he maintained in public.
"We did it," he said. Quiet enough that only I could hear.
"Yeah. We did."
The bus turned onto the main road. Boston's lights sliding past the windows. The city that had watched us race today, indifferent and beautiful and already moving on.
Liam's head tipped again. This time he didn't catch himself. His temple came to rest against my shoulder. Light. Barely there. The weight of a person who'd stopped fighting gravity.
I held still. Didn't breathe. My eyes scanning the bus—Tyler asleep, Derek eyes-closed, Jace facing forward. Remy two rows up, laptop open, the screen's glow on his face. Nobody looking.
Liam's breathing changed. Slowed. The steady rhythm of a person dropping into sleep.
I let him stay.
His head on my shoulder. His warmth against my arm. The bus carrying us through Boston at night while thirty teammates slept or scrolled their phones or stared out windows, and two rowers in the back row held a secret that was getting harder to keep and easier to want.
Tomorrow we'd go home. Back to Ashford. Back to the anonymous texter who was out there, patient and watching. Back to my father's arrangements and everything that was waiting for us on the other side of this weekend.
But right now—right now Liam's head was on my shoulder. And nobody was watching. And the race was won. And for five minutes on a bus in Boston, I let myself believe that this was the beginning of something instead of the end.
I closed my eyes.
Let his breathing carry me under.
Chapter 28: Liam
The dorm room felt different when I walked in.
Not the room itself—same water stain on the ceiling, same cracked plaster, same pile of crew gear on my side and organized index cards on Noah's. But I was different. The room was the same and I was different.
Noah looked up from his laptop. Read my face in about two seconds.
"Good trip?"
"Yeah." I dropped my bag on the floor. Sat on my bed. The mattress sagging under me the way it always did. "Really good."
"Tell me about the race."
So I did. The start. The Eliot Bridge turn, the outside route, the rough water we talked through instead of dying in. The middle miles where the pain was real and we kept talking anyway. The sprint and the finish.
I didn't tell him about the hotel room. Didn't tell him about the hand on the shoulder or the bus ride where I'd fallen asleep against Alex's arm. Just the race.
But Noah could see the rest. He always could.
"You look different," he said.
"People keep telling me that."
"No, I mean—" He paused. Set his laptop aside. The gesture that meant he was giving me his full attention, which from Noah was like a spotlight. "You look like yourself. For the first time since I've known you."
The words landed somewhere deep. Somewhere I hadn't let anyone reach in a long time.
"Yeah," I said. "I think I might be."
