Somewhere Only We Know - 5. Into Sophomore Year

Summer settled over Lakehurst slowly, like a warm blanket being pulled higher inch by inch. The lake lost its last trace of spring chill and grew dark and inviting, the trees along the shore thickened into lush green, and the air hummed with heat and the lazy rhythm of long afternoons. For Matt and Kitt, the season came with a strange tangle of closeness and distance—so tightly woven together that neither of them could tell where one ended and the other began.

Matt and Lindsay were dating now. Really dating. There wasn’t a public announcement or a dramatic kiss in the hallway; it was quieter than that, smaller things shifting until they became something solid. Lindsay waited by Matt’s locker in the mornings. Matt carried her books without thinking about it. Their hands reached for each other naturally, fingers threading together like it had always been that way. Matt didn’t flaunt it—he’d never been the type to perform his life for other people—but he didn’t hide it either. And people noticed.

Kitt noticed most of all.

He didn’t fall apart this time. He didn’t let the feeling swallow him the way it could have back in winter. But there was a quiet pressure that settled in his ribs when he saw them laughing together—a soft tightness in his throat when Lindsay’s hand slipped into Matt’s, when Matt’s attention tilted away. It wasn’t jealousy in the sharp, dramatic sense. It felt more like standing outside at night and looking through a window into a warm room he used to live in, watching someone else sit on the couch where he used to sit.

He coped the way he’d promised he would.

He didn’t run.
He didn’t disappear.
He didn’t break.

He went to swim practice with a focus that startled his coach. He drilled his breathing patterns until they were mechanical, honed his turns at the wall, pushed harder off each start. He helped younger teammates adjust their strokes, adjusting arms and timing with patient hands. At home, he kept his grades up, even as his father’s expectations sharpened into something that pressed against his chest like a too-tight shirt.

“You’re older now,” his father told him one evening while Kitt set the table, plates clinking softly against the wood. “No more slacking. Summer isn’t for wasting time.”

“Yes, sir,” Kitt said.

He didn’t argue; he rarely did. But he could feel his edges tightening again, pressure building in the quiet spaces between school, home, and the lake.

He didn’t tell Matt all of it. Not the way it sat heavy in his lungs. Not the way it scared him to feel like there was no room left to fail. But Matt saw parts of it anyway, in the set of his shoulders, in the way he smiled more with his mouth than his eyes.

“You’re doing that thing again,” Matt said one afternoon as they sat on the hill above the lake, watching ducks leave thin wakes across the water. “Where you pretend you’re fine but look like you’re secretly dying.”

Kitt snorted, a small sound.

“I’m not secretly dying,” he said.

“You’re at least dying a little bit,” Matt insisted, flicking a pebble at his sneaker. “And we promised, remember? No hiding.”

“I remember,” Kitt murmured. “I’m just trying to handle things better.”

Matt watched him closely, jaw setting in that familiar stubborn line that meant he wasn’t going to let it drop.

“You don’t have to handle it alone,” he said.

Kitt didn’t answer right away. The truth sat too close to the surface. If he let it out, too much might come with it.

“I’m serious, Kitt,” Matt added, nudging his shoulder. “Don’t shut me out.”

“I’m not trying to,” Kitt said quietly.

“I know,” Matt replied, softer. “That’s why I’m telling you before you start.”

The warmth in his voice settled somewhere deep in Kitt’s chest, steadying and terrifying at the same time.

Summer kept going like that—good days and complicated ones, laughter layered over quiet aches neither of them knew how to name. Some afternoons felt like the old days, easy and bright. Other days, the air between them felt crowded with unspoken things.

Then came the meet.

The natatorium was hot and loud, its air thick with chlorine and echoing voices. Swimmers stretched on the slick deck, goggles pushed onto foreheads, caps snapping into place. Coaches barked instructions. Parents filled the bleachers, a shifting sea of shirts and programs and restless anticipation.

Kitt stood by his lane, adjusting his goggles, heartbeat steadying itself into the familiar pre-race thrum. He hadn’t asked anyone to come beyond his parents. He didn’t expect anyone else.

So when he heard a shout slice through the noise—

“KITT!! WE’RE HERE!!”

—he turned, startled enough that his goggles slipped in his hands.

Matt stood halfway up the bleachers, waving both arms like he was trying to guide a plane in for landing. Lindsay was next to him, clapping with bright, almost bouncing enthusiasm.

Kitt’s heart squeezed so tight that for a second he forgot how to inhale.

Matt grinned down at him, all teeth and unfiltered pride, like there was nowhere else in the world he’d rather be. Kitt had to look away quickly, afraid that if he kept staring his face would give everything away.

When his event was called, he stepped onto the block. The whistle blew. He dove.

Underwater, the world shrank to the lane in front of him and the familiar rhythm of his body—stroke, pull, kick, breathe. The noise above turned to a muffled roar. Chlorine burned at the back of his throat, his lungs ached, his muscles screamed in the best way. And somehow, even under the surface, he thought he could still hear Matt shouting his name.

He hit the wall and surfaced, gasping.

First place flashed on the board. A time that beat his personal best by almost a full second.

For a moment, Kitt just stared, water dripping from his hair into his eyes. Then the sound of the crowd poured back in, and with it—

“That was INSANE!”

Matt practically launched himself down the bleachers, ignoring the coach yelling at him to slow down on the wet deck. He skidded to a stop in front of Kitt and grabbed his shoulders with both hands, shaking him once like he couldn’t contain himself.

“You’re amazing,” Matt shouted, grinning so wide it hurt to look at. “Holy crap, Kitt, that was unreal!”

Lindsay laughed beside him, eyes bright.

“Seriously,” she said. “You were incredible.”

Kitt’s cheeks flushed hot despite the chill of the water. It wasn’t the win that did it, or even the praise. It was the way Matt was looking at him—like the whole meet had been about this one race, like everyone else in the natatorium had blurred into the background.

On the car ride home, his father kept his eyes on the road.

“Good work,” he said finally.

Just that. No more, no less.

It didn’t sting the way it used to. Not as sharply. Not when the echo of Matt’s voice—You’re amazing—was still ringing in his ears. Not when he could still feel the weight of Matt’s hands on his shoulders and see Lindsay’s proud smile at his side.

After that, something changed in the way Matt looked at him.

It wasn’t obvious, not to anyone else. It showed up in small pauses—Matt glancing at him in the middle of lunch, studying his face like he was trying to solve a puzzle; the way his gaze drifted toward Kitt in crowded hallways even when Lindsay was talking to him; the way his laughter dimmed by just a fraction when Kitt wasn’t there.

Lindsay didn’t seem to notice anything wrong. She slipped her hand into Matt’s, sent him strings of emojis, kissed him in quick, shy bursts between classes. She was good to him; Kitt could see that. Matt liked her—Kitt could see that too. But there were moments now when Matt’s eyes seemed split—one part on her, one part somewhere else. Somewhere quieter.

Sometimes Kitt caught him staring, brow furrowed just slightly, as if Matt was trying to understand a feeling that had no name yet.

One warm night in late June, Matt couldn’t sleep. He rolled over, stared at the ceiling, flipped his pillow, checked the time, and finally picked up his phone.

Are you awake? he typed.

He didn’t expect an answer right away.

Yes, came back within a minute. Can’t sleep.

Matt stared at the reply for a long moment. Then he typed:

Lake?

The answer came almost immediately.

Yeah.

He slipped on his sneakers, eased his window open, and climbed out. The air outside was thick and warm, crickets singing somewhere in the grass, the sky above a dark velvet scattered with stars.

The lake waited like it always did, still and reflective, the moon resting in its center. Fireflies blinked lazily along the tree line. Matt walked out onto the dock and sat, legs hanging over the edge, sneakers hovering above the water.

Kitt arrived a few minutes later, moving quietly down the trail. He joined him on the dock without a word, sitting close enough that their shoulders nearly touched.

For a while, they just breathed the same night air.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Matt said at last, eyes fixed on the lake.

Kitt turned his head slightly. “What do you mean?”

“Everything feels… off,” Matt said. He searched for words, frowning at his reflection. “Like I’m split in two. Like no matter what I do, I’m messing something up without trying to.”

“You’re not messing anything up,” Kitt said, concerned. “You’re just… figuring things out.”

Matt shook his head. “I don’t know. Lindsay’s great. She really is. But sometimes I look at you and—”

He stopped. His breath caught.

Kitt’s heart stopped with it.

Matt’s voice dropped, barely above the sound of the water lapping at the dock.

“Sometimes I feel things I’m not sure of,” he said. “And I don’t know what to do with them.”

The world tilted around Kitt, slow and dizzy. The air seemed to thicken, pressing against his skin.

“Matt,” he whispered, not trusting his voice with anything more.

Matt kept his eyes on the lake, like if he looked at Kitt he wouldn’t be able to keep talking.

“I’m not trying to ruin anything,” he said quietly. “I’m not trying to hurt Lindsay. Or you. Or anyone. I just… can’t figure myself out lately.”

“You don’t have to tell me things you don’t understand yet,” Kitt said, forcing the words out steadily.

“But I want to,” Matt answered, and that was the part that scared him most. “You’re the one person I—”

He cut himself off, jaw tightening, eyes closing briefly like the rest of the sentence had physically hurt to stop.

Kitt looked away, throat closing. “It’s okay,” he said softly. “You don’t owe me an explanation.”

Matt’s expression twisted, uncertainty and frustration tangled together.

“I think I do,” he said.

Silence settled between them, heavy and alive. Their hands lay on the dock, inches apart, the space between them humming like a stretched wire. Fireflies blinked. The moon held still in the water.

Matt’s fingers twitched, inching ever so slightly closer.

Kitt’s breath hitched.

The night itself seemed to hold still, suspended on the edge of something.

“Thanks for staying with me,” Matt whispered. “Even when it hurts.”

Kitt’s eyes stung.

“Always,” he said.

They stayed like that, two shapes outlined against the dim glow of the lake, sharing a fragile stillness that felt like it could have tipped into something else with one wrong move. Something leaned forward inside both of them—toward confession, toward change, toward whatever waited past the safety of almost.

But almost stayed almost.

Not tonight.
Not while Lindsay’s name still lived in Matt’s phone.
Not while neither of them knew what a different answer would mean.

By the time they stood, the fireflies had dimmed and the moon had slipped lower behind the trees. They walked home quietly, each boy carrying more than he’d arrived with. Neither of them mentioned the way their hands had nearly met on the dock. Neither of them said the words that trembled unsaid in the back of their throats.

But they both felt it: whatever innocence had been left in their friendship was thinning, stretching, wearing at the edges. Sophomore year was already on its way, and it wasn’t bringing anything simple with it.

. . .

Sophomore year began the way some dreams change scenes—so quietly that no one realizes it until everything looks different. The first morning back, the air felt sharper, sunlight hitting the lockers at an angle that made them gleam like rows of metal mirrors. Hallways vibrated with stories of camp, trips, “you wouldn’t believe what happened,” and more than a few new haircuts. Locker doors slammed, schedules crinkled, someone dropped a stack of binders that skidded across the floor.

Matt and Lindsay walked in together, their fingers laced loosely. Lindsay looked happy—energized by the noise and movement. Matt looked… distracted. Like part of him was there and part of him was still somewhere else, standing on a dock under the moon.

It didn’t take long for small cracks to appear.

Lindsay started expecting things in ways she hadn’t before—more texts throughout the day, longer calls at night, lunch periods spent entirely with her and her friends. She asked who Matt was with, where he was going after practice, whether he wanted to go to the coffee shop before heading home. None of it was unreasonable on its own. None of it was cruel.

But Matt was used to moving through his days with more openness—deciding things after the bell rang, inviting Kitt to the lake on a whim, stopping to toss a football around with whoever was free. Every time Lindsay tugged gently at his sleeve and said, “Sit with me,” Kitt saw something else tug at him in the opposite direction.

One afternoon, standing near the lockers, Lindsay looked up at Matt and asked,

“Come to my place after school? We can study together.”

Matt hesitated, just for a second.

“I promised Kitt I’d walk home with him,” he said.

Lindsay smiled, but something in it didn’t quite reach her eyes.

“I mean,” she said lightly, “you can walk home with him tomorrow.”

Kitt, who was close enough to hear but far enough away to pretend he wasn’t listening, re-arranged his books in his arms and focused very hard on a stain on the floor tile.

Matt rubbed the back of his neck.

“Yeah,” he said. “Okay. Sure.”

Kitt glanced up, catching his eye for a heartbeat. He gave him a small smile—polite, easy, like it was nothing at all.

“See you,” he said.

Matt nodded, but the look he gave back wasn’t quite a smile. It was something more complicated, something pulled taut between wanting and obligation.

At home, Kitt faced a different kind of trouble.

His father, who had always been serious and structured, now seemed to watch him the way someone watched for cracks in a foundation.

“You’re with Matthew again?” he asked one evening, not looking up from the mail he was sorting.

“Yes, sir,” Kitt answered, drying his hands on a dish towel.

“Do you boys get… too close?”

The question hung in the air like smoke.

Kitt’s heart stuttered. “We’re just friends,” he said quickly.

His father hummed in a way that wasn’t quite approval and wasn’t quite suspicion either, just a sound that said the topic wasn’t really closed.

Later, there were more questions.

“Your grades slipped a point in algebra. Are you distracted?”
“Why don’t you spend time with more people? You always seem to be with the same boy.”
“You’re at the lake so often. What do you do there?”

They weren’t accusations—not exactly. But there was something sharper at the edges now, a hint of suspicion Kitt could feel even when his father was silent.

The truth was, Kitt was hiding something, even if he didn’t fully understand it himself. He didn’t know how much of it showed in the way his body stiffened when his father said Matt’s name, or how his eyes dropped automatically when questions became too pointed. He tried to keep his voice steady, his answers neat, his movements careful.

But older boys in religious households lived under a different set of expectations. And Kitt could feel them closing around him like slowly tightening wires.

Matt noticed.

They were walking home one afternoon, kicking dry leaves down Willow Creek Drive, the sky a flat pale blue overhead.

“Is everything okay at home?” Matt asked, his voice quieter than usual.

“It’s fine,” Kitt said.

“Kitt,” Matt said, “I can tell when something’s wrong.”

Kitt swallowed, eyes on the sidewalk.

“My dad’s just… stricter lately,” he admitted.

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” Kitt lied. The real answer—because of you. because of us. because he sees something I’m trying not to see—sat like a stone in his throat. “He thinks I’m distracted.”

“By what?” Matt asked, and then he caught his own question, heard the answer before Kitt said anything. “Oh.”

Kitt didn’t look up.

“It’s not your fault,” he said.

“I didn’t say it was,” Matt murmured, but his voice carried guilt anyway. “I just… didn’t know it was that bad.”

“It’s not bad,” Kitt said too quickly. “I can manage it.”

Matt stopped walking for a second, forcing Kitt to either stop too or leave him behind. Kitt stopped.

“Don’t ‘manage’ it alone,” Matt said. “Talk to me. Okay?”

Kitt nodded, the motion small. “Okay,” he said, even though the word felt fragile.

Matt’s confusion, meanwhile, grew in ways he didn’t know how to talk about. He still liked Lindsay. He cared about her. He worried when she was upset. He wanted her to be happy.

But sometimes, mid-practice, in the middle of a sprint or while waiting for a drill to start, his mind wandered not to her laugh, but to the look on Kitt’s face when he’d touched the wall at that summer meet. To the way Kitt’s eyes softened at the lake. To how sitting on the dock with him felt like the world shrinking down to something both unbearably small and impossibly huge.

Sometimes he’d hear Lindsay laugh at one of his jokes and feel absolutely nothing shift inside his chest. Then he’d hear Kitt say a simple, quiet “hey” and feel the ground move a little.

He hated himself for noticing the difference. He didn’t understand what it meant. He didn’t have a name for it, only a sense that something inside him had slipped out of alignment.

One night, he opened his notes app and typed:

Why do I feel more like myself around Kitt than anyone else? Why does that scare me?

He stared at it for three seconds and then deleted it so fast it was as if it had burned his fingers.

After that, the lake began to feel dangerous.

Not in the way cliffs or currents were dangerous. In the way truth was.

It was too quiet there. Too familiar. The water reflected them side by side, blending their shapes into something that looked, from certain angles, like one thing instead of two. It became the one place where the pull he felt toward Kitt was impossible to ignore.

So they went less.

Not because they didn’t want to, but because they wanted it too much.

On the rare days when they did walk the trail, they sat farther apart on the dock. Their shoulders almost touched and didn’t. Their breaths almost synced and didn’t. The space between them felt crowded with everything they weren’t saying.

One late afternoon, as the sun dropped behind the trees and the lake turned dull gold, Matt stood at the edge of the dock with his hands buried in his pockets. Kitt sat behind him, knees pulled up, head resting lightly against one of the posts.

“Do you ever feel,” Matt asked slowly, “like the lake knows too much about us?”

Kitt blinked. “What do you mean?”

Matt shrugged one shoulder. “Like if we stay here too long, it’ll make us say things we shouldn’t.”

Kitt’s pulse jumped.

“Yeah,” he whispered. “I know.”

Matt turned slightly, finding Kitt’s outline in the fading light. His lips parted like he was going to say something important—something heavy and sharp-edged and honest.

Then he closed his mouth again.

A breeze rippled across the water, breaking the reflection into pieces. The moment shattered with it, slipping between them and sinking before either boy could catch it.

They left not long after, walking home by habit. Their houses appeared ahead—porch lights glowing on opposite sides of the street, familiar and suddenly distant at the same time.

At the curb, Matt stopped, his shoulders tight inside his hoodie.

“Kitt,” he said quietly, “I don’t want things to get weird.”

“They’re not weird,” Kitt said, barely above the rustle of leaves.

“Not yet,” Matt replied. “But I feel like they could be.”

Kitt’s throat burned.

“We promised,” he said. “We don’t run.”

Matt looked down at his shoes, then back up at Kitt’s face.

“I know,” he said. “I’m trying.”

Kitt nodded once. “Me too.”

They crossed the street in opposite directions, each heading toward a different front door, each carrying the same thought in a slightly different shape:

Sophomore year was not going to be gentle.

Not with Matt’s growing confusion.
Not with Kitt’s growing fear.
Not with the lake holding every word they were still too afraid to speak.

Everything was changing now.

And neither of them knew how to stop it.