Chapter 9
Aaron
My phone buzzes against the shelf of my locker and I already know who it is.
I shouldn’t look. I should finish taping my stick and get my head in the game because this is it — last game of junior year, home against Michigan, and it’s March, and every seat in the arena is full.
Scouts, cameras, Diego in the third row doing something manic on his phone, my parents, Caitlin, Sean, Colin, and Mary somewhere behind the bench.
Meghan texted twenty minutes ago to say she’s here too.
I look.
Sasha: Thinking about you in those pads. Very distracting.
I close my eyes. Not now.
Six months. Six months of this — him in my head every second I’m not on the ice, and most of the seconds when I am.
We’re 27-8-3. Best record the Sentinels have had in over a decade.
The press has been calling us the most dominant line in college hockey, and Diego’s been cashing in on every minute of it.
Three major sponsorships, a podcast, a social media deal, and enough media coverage that my mother has a Google alert set for my name.
My dad watches highlights on his phone at dinner.
Sean and Colin text me stats after every game like they’ve been hockey fans their whole lives instead of just the last four months.
All of that — all of it — and the thing I’m thinking about right now is Sasha Vorontsovsky’s text message.
I type back fast.
Me: You’re not going to throw me off my game by sexting me.
Me: Not going to work.
Three dots. They pulse for a long time. Way too long for a normal response.
Sasha: Who said anything about sexting? I said your pads are distracting. You look good in equipment. Very athletic. Very strong. I am simply making an observation about your physical fitness.
Sasha: But since you brought it up.
Sasha: I’ve been thinking about what I want to do to you after we win tonight. Do you want details or should I let you wonder?
My thumb hovers over the keyboard. My ears are hot. Robertson is three lockers down talking to Cooper about Michigan’s game plan and I need to not be standing here with my face on fire.
Me: I want you to stop texting me. We have a game in twenty minutes.
Sasha: That’s not a no to the details.
Sasha: I’ll take that as a yes.
What comes next is — graphic. Detailed. Specific enough that my hand tightens on my phone and I have to read it twice because the first time my brain short-circuits halfway through the second sentence.
I shove my phone into my locker and shut the door. Hard.
I’m going to kill him.
My pulse is too fast. My skin is too warm.
There are TV cameras out there and my entire family and an arena full of people and I need to be thinking about Michigan’s defense, how their goalie plays, where the openings are — not about what Sasha wants to do to me in explicit detail against a surface he specified by name.
I press my forehead against the cool metal of my locker and breathe.
Twenty-nine goals this season. One more tonight and I set a personal record. One more and I’m the highest-scoring player in the conference. Diego has been texting me about it all week — do you know what a record-setting season does for your brand, bro? — and my dad is in the stands tonight.
I want this. I want the goal, the record, the win. I want to end junior year on top.
I also want to open my locker and read that text again.
I don’t.
“Kell.” Robertson slaps the back of my stall. “You good?”
“Yeah. Good.” I grab my helmet. “Let’s go.”
The arena is loud. Loud enough to feel in my teeth, in my sternum. Every seat taken, the student section already on their feet, and the Sentinels tunnel is vibrating with it.
I step onto the ice and the cold hits my lungs and everything else falls away. This is where I know who I am. This is the one place that’s never complicated.
Michigan is already warming up on their half. Big team, physical, ranked fourth in the nation. They’ve been talking trash about us all week — their captain did an interview calling our record “inflated by a weak schedule.” Sasha saw the clip and laughed so hard he choked on his water.
I take my warm-up laps and I don’t look at him. I don’t need to look at him to know where he is. I can feel it — where he is on the ice, the way the crowd shifts when he touches the puck. SA-SHA. SA-SHA. The chant starts during warm-ups now. It didn’t used to.
He skates past me. Close enough that his shoulder almost clips mine.
“I love to see your face flushed, Aaron Kelly,” he says, low enough that nobody else can hear.
I stare straight ahead. “I’m going to outscore you tonight.”
“You can try.”
He’s gone. Skating backward, that lazy grin, stick tapping the ice like the whole arena belongs to him.
I’m going to outscore him. And then I’m going to kill him.
First period is a war.
Michigan comes out hitting everything that moves.
Their pressure is relentless — two guys on the puck every time, making us fight for every inch.
Cooper takes a hit behind our net that rattles the glass.
Robertson gets tangled up along the boards and comes back to the bench spitting blood from a split lip.
“Classy,” he says, grabbing a towel. “Real classy.”
We’re better, though. We’ve been better than everyone all year and Michigan isn’t going to change that in the first period of the last game of the season.
Sasha and I are on the same line and it’s the thing I can never explain to anyone — how it works between us out here.
I know where he’s going before he goes. He knows what I’m going to do before I do it.
Six months of this, hundreds of shifts, and the read is automatic now.
Instinct. He draws two defenders, dishes to Robertson, Robertson finds me in the slot — I snap it far side and the goalie gets a piece but can’t hold it and the puck trickles wide.
Close.
Sasha circles back to the bench. Our eyes meet for a half second as I step off.
“Almost, Aaron Kelly.” He’s breathing hard. Sweat on his forehead, hair damp against his neck. “Not quite.”
“Next one.”
“We’ll see.”
We make each other better and we make each other crazy.
Every shift I’m trying to outplay him and he’s trying to outplay me and somewhere in that fight we’re also perfectly in sync.
The press calls it the Kelly-Vorontsovsky connection, and Diego has made a whole brand out of it, and nobody — not the cameras, not the fans, not my family in the stands — nobody has any idea what’s actually underneath it.
The competition is real. The rivalry is real. I want to be the one to score the winning goal, and so does he, and that hasn’t changed since the day I got here.
It’s just that now I also want to pin him against the locker room wall and —
I take a drink of water and stare at the ice.
Focus.
Second period. Still scoreless. The crowd is getting restless and Michigan is getting dirtier. Their number 24 runs Sasha into the boards on a play along the boards and holds him there too long and my whole body clenches before I realize I’m already skating toward them.
Sasha shoves the guy off himself. He doesn’t need my help. He never needs my help.
But my legs moved before my brain caught up, and that’s a problem I don’t have time to think about right now.
The game opens up in the last five minutes of the second.
Michigan’s D-man coughs up the puck at the blue line and Sasha picks it off and goes — and when Sasha goes, it’s something else entirely.
He’s faster than anyone on either team and he knows it.
He cuts through the neutral zone, blows past one defender, and he’s in alone and the whole arena is on its feet and the chant is deafening — SA-SHA, SA-SHA —
The goalie makes the save. A desperation save, ugly but effective.
Sasha slams his stick against the boards. The crowd groans.
He comes back to the bench and sits down next to me, chest heaving, and doesn’t say anything for a few seconds.
“That was mine,” he finally says.
“Yep.”
“I had him beat.”
“You did.”
He looks at me sideways. His eyes are electric. Furious and alive and something else that hits me right below the ribs.
“I want that goal, Aaron Kelly.”
“So do I.”
We stare at each other. The bench between us feels like three inches instead of three feet.
“May the best player win,” he says.
“That’s the plan.”
Third period. Four minutes left. Still 0-0. My legs are burning and my lungs are on fire. Michigan’s goalie has been unreal all night. I want this so badly my hands are shaking.
Rafferty sends our line out. Last real shift of junior year, probably. Robertson, Sasha, me. The line that’s carried this team all year.
The faceoff is in Michigan’s zone. Sasha wins the faceoff — back to Cooper. Cooper holds it at the line, waits, feeds it to Robertson along the boards. Michigan’s defense collapses on him. Robertson cycles it back to Sasha behind the net.
This is where it happens. The thing that nobody else can do.
Sasha has the puck behind the goal line and two defenders are closing and he looks left, looks right, and I know — I know — he sees me. I’m parked in front of the net, Michigan’s defender draped on my back, and there’s a gap. A sliver between the defender’s stick and the goalie’s pad.
Sasha threads it. A pass so precise it’s almost disrespectful — through traffic, perfectly, and the puck is on my blade and the gap is still there and I don’t think. My body does it. Wrists snap, puck goes top corner, and the red light is on.
The building detonates.
The team hits me before I can get my arms up.
Bodies slamming into me, helmets crashing together, gloves pounding my back.
Robertson is screaming in my ear. Cooper has me in a headlock.
Somebody’s grabbing my jersey and shaking me.
The ice is under my knees because the impact knocked me down and I don’t care because I just scored the game-winner and set the season record and my legs are shaking and the noise is so loud I can feel it in my jaw.
Thirty goals. Nobody in the conference has hit thirty this season. Nobody in Ashford’s program has hit thirty in five years.
I look up from the pile.
Sasha is standing ten feet away. Not rushing in with the others. His helmet is off, his hair is wild, and he’s got his stick resting across his thighs. He’s just — watching me.
Not jealous. Not frustrated. The look on his face is something I don’t have a name for. Like he fed me that pass on purpose. Like he wanted me to have it.
Like watching me score is the thing that gets him off.
My throat goes tight and I look away before my face gives me up in front of thousands of people.
The locker room is chaos. Guys yelling, music blasting, Cooper pouring water over Robertson’s head while Robertson tries to wrestle him into a headlock. Finley Callan, who stopped thirty-six shots and deserves a statue, is sitting in his stall grinning like he just won the lottery.
“O’Reilly’s!” Young shouts from across the room. “Everybody. The bar. No excuses. Declan’s probably already got our tab going.”
“Season-ending tradition,” Robertson says. “You coming, Kell?”
“Yeah.” I’m pulling my jersey over my head, still buzzing. “Yeah, I’m coming.”
I shower fast. Put on my jeans and a T-shirt and try not to think about the fact that Sasha is two stalls away doing the same thing. I catch his eye once in the mirror and he gives me nothing. Blank. Easy. Like I’m just another teammate.
He’s better at this than I am. He’s always been better at this than I am.
The team pours out of the arena in a loud, happy wave.
March air, still cold, breath visible under the parking lot lights.
Guys are shoulder-checking each other, replaying goals, talking about the off-season already.
My dad caught me outside the locker room for a hug and told me he was proud of me, and my mom had tears in her eyes, and Meghan squeezed my arm and said “thirty goals, Aaron, that’s insane,” and Diego pointed at me with both hands and yelled “THAT’S MY GUY” from across the hallway, and all of it was good. All of it was real.
Sasha is five feet ahead of me in the group. Walking with Bennett, saying something I can’t hear. His jacket is unzipped and his hair is still damp from the shower and he hasn’t said a word to me since the game ended.
My phone buzzes.
I pull it out. One message.
Sasha: Good game. And you looked hot doing it.
The heat hits my face so fast it’s almost painful. I don’t look up. I can’t look up because if I look up right now I’m going to look directly at him and everyone will see it.
And all I can think is that the only person I want to celebrate with tonight is five feet away, and I can’t touch him.