How can I ‘echo’ out things without a newline?

Yes. Use the -n option:

echo -n "$x"

From help echo:

-n do not append a newline

This would strips off the last newline too, so if you want you can add a final newline after the loop:

for ...; do ...; done; echo

Note:

This is not portable among various implementations of echo builtin/external executable. The portable way would be to use printf instead:

printf '%s' "$x"