Chapter 24
Sasha
Aaron is dead asleep and I don’t want to move.
His whole body is slack against mine — shoulders loose, jaw soft, one hand curled against my forearm where it’s wrapped around his waist. His breathing is slow and even and his hair is a mess, sticking up in four directions, and I can feel his heartbeat under my palm. Steady. Calm.
I’ve been awake for twenty minutes. Haven’t moved. We’ve been here for days now. Every night falling asleep like this — his back against my chest, my arm around his waist. Every morning waking up and he’s still here.
Back at Ashford, we don’t get this. We get a few hours in a locked room, one ear on the door, alarms set so he can sneak back before anyone notices. We get stolen time. Never enough of it.
Here, I get to watch him sleep. Here, I get to press my mouth to the back of his neck and feel him shift closer without waking up, like his body knows where I am even when his brain is off.
I do it again. A kiss below his ear. His shoulder. The knob of his spine where it meets his neck. He makes a sound — not awake, not asleep, somewhere in between — and his fingers tighten on my arm.
I could stay here all day. I could stay here for a year.
“Mmph.” He stirs. Rolls his head back against my shoulder and blinks, slow and unfocused. His green eyes find mine and he squints like the light is personally offending him.
“Morning,” I say.
“What time is it?”
“Eleven.”
“Jesus.” He rubs his face with one hand. “How long have you been awake?”
“A while.”
“Doing what?”
“Watching you drool on my arm.”
“I don’t drool.”
“You drool a little.” I kiss his temple. “It’s cute.”
He groans and shoves his face into the pillow, and I laugh. Even rumpled and half-asleep and annoyed, he’s the best thing I’ve ever seen. The bruise I left on his collarbone last night is just visible above the edge of the sheet. I put my mouth on it because I can.
“Want breakfast?” I reach for the room service menu on the nightstand. “Eggs? Pancakes? They do this French toast thing with —”
“Don’t.” He holds up a hand without lifting his face from the pillow. “Don’t say the word food. I’m still recovering from last night.”
“You ate an entire rack of lamb by yourself.”
“You kept putting things on my plate.”
“Because you kept eating them.”
He rolls onto his back and stares at the ceiling. “That Christmas dinner might have killed me. I think my stomach is permanently stretched.”
“Good. You don’t eat enough.”
“I eat plenty.”
“At school you eat protein bars and dining hall chicken. That’s not food, Aaron Kelly, that’s survival.”
He laughs. It’s rough with sleep and it gets me every time. “Fair.”
I pick up the phone on the nightstand and call down for coffee. Two cups, black, strong. The woman on the other end knows my voice by now — we’ve been here long enough that the staff has stopped being formal and started being friendly.
“Just coffee?” Aaron asks when I hang up.
“Just coffee.” I push the covers back. “And a bath.”
He props himself up on his elbows. Watches me cross the bedroom toward the bathroom. I’m naked and I don’t care, and I can feel his eyes on me. That part hasn’t changed — the way he looks at me when he thinks I’m not paying attention. Except now he doesn’t look away when I catch him.
Progress.
“A bath,” he repeats.
“The big tub. The one by the window.” I lean through the bathroom doorway and turn the faucet. Hot water hits the marble and steam starts curling up immediately. “I’ve been wanting to get you in that thing since we got here.”
“You’ve had me in the shower, the hot tub, and the bed. Multiple times.”
“And now the bath. I’m thorough.”
“You’re insatiable.”
“Also true.” I grin at him over my shoulder. “But I meant just a bath. Hot water. Watching the snow fall. You and me. Romantic.”
The joke drops away. His face goes open, unguarded. He almost never looks like that.
“Yeah,” he says. “Okay.”
The tub takes ten minutes to fill. I dump in whatever expensive bath stuff the hotel has left in the glass bottles by the sink — something that smells like eucalyptus and cedar — and by the time Aaron pads in from the bedroom in one of the hotel robes, the bathroom is thick with steam.
He stops in the doorway. Looks at the tub, the steam, the snow falling past the window.
“Get in,” I tell him. I’m already in, one arm along the rim, the hot water up to my chest. The tub is massive — white marble, freestanding, positioned right by the window so you can lie back and watch the city.
Right now the city is a blur of white. The snow has been falling for days and everything below us — the rooftops, the streets, the park — is buried under it.
Aaron drops the robe. Steps in.
The sound he makes when the hot water hits his legs is obscene. Full-body groan, eyes closing, head tipping back. He sinks down until the water is at his shoulders, his back settling against my chest, and I wrap my arms around him and pull him in.
His skin is warm and slippery under my hands. The water is almost too hot and the steam fogs the window and through the blur I can see the snow still coming down, thick and quiet.
He tilts his head back against my shoulder. “This is insane.”
“The bath?”
“All of it.” He gestures vaguely with a wet hand. “This hotel. This tub. The fact that we’ve been snowed in for — how many days now?”
“I’ve lost count.”
“That’s my point.” He settles deeper against me. His hand finds my knee underwater and rests there. “I don’t even know what day it is. I never don’t know what day it is.”
“It’s December twenty-sixth.”
“I know that. I mean —” He pauses. “I mean I don’t know what day it feels like. It doesn’t feel like any day. It just feels like this.”
I know what he means. We’ve been in a pocket outside of real time. No practice schedule. No classes. No alarm set for 5 AM skate. No sneaking back to separate dorm rooms before the sun comes up. Just us, in this penthouse, with the snow locking the doors.
“This is what it could be like,” I say. “If things were different.”
He’s quiet for a moment. His thumb traces circles on my kneecap underwater.
“What do you mean, different?”
“I mean not secret.” I keep my voice easy. Not pushing. Just saying it. “Not sneaking around. Not pretending we’re just rivals who can’t stand each other.”
His hand goes still on my knee. I wait. This is where he usually deflects — cracks a joke, changes the subject, finds some reason to pull back. I’ve learned the rhythm of it. Push, retreat, push, retreat.
But he doesn’t pull back.
“I think about that,” he says. Quiet. Like it’s costing him something to say it out loud. “More than I used to.”
My heart rate picks up. I keep my body still, my arms loose around him, because if I react too much he’ll shut down.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” He exhales. The steam shifts around his mouth. “Before — before us, I mean — I never thought about it. Coming out. Being with someone. I just figured I’d keep it to myself forever and that would be fine. It was the plan.”
“That’s a terrible plan.”
“I know that now.”
I press my smile against his wet hair. “So what changed?”
He turns his head. Looks up at me, his green eyes close and serious, water droplets caught in his lashes. “You.”
One word. No deflection. No joke to soften it.
My chest does something huge and stupid and I let it.
“You just —” He turns back, settles against me again. “You’re so sure of yourself. You always have been. You know what you want and you go after it and you don’t apologize for any of it. Even with all the stuff with your visa and your family and everything, you still just — you’re not afraid.”
“I’m afraid of plenty.”
“Not of this.” His hand squeezes my knee. “Not of wanting things.”
He’s right. I’m not afraid of wanting him.
I’ve known I wanted him since the first time I saw him on game tape — this intense, green-eyed American right wing who played like he had something to prove to everyone in the building.
I wanted him before I knew his name. Before I tracked him down that morning on the rink having his solo practice before the season began.
The wanting has never been the problem for me. The timing has.
“You’re getting there,” I tell him. “You know that, right?”
“Getting where?”
“Braver.” I run my hand along his arm underwater. His bicep, his forearm, his wrist. “Six months ago you wouldn’t have told me any of that.”
“Six months ago I was still pretending I hated you.”
“You were very convincing. The death glares were excellent.”
He laughs. “I did hate you. A little.”
“You hated that you wanted me. Different thing.”
“God, you’re smug.”
“I’m right.”
He doesn’t argue. He laces his fingers through mine under the water and holds on, and we sit like that for a while. The snow falling. The steam rising. His back warm against my chest and his hand tight in mine and nowhere to be.
I think about the citizenship application that still hasn’t come through. After graduation, after I start with the Titans, after the work visa converts. My lawyer says it’s straightforward. My agent says don’t do anything public until the paperwork clears.
I’m not going to hide forever. I’ve never planned to. When the citizenship comes through, I’m coming out — bisexual, public, done. I’ve known that since I was fifteen and I made my peace with it a long time ago.
But I can’t do it yet. And Aaron can’t do it yet. And in the meantime we have this — locked hotel rooms and snowstorms and mornings in a bathtub where nobody knows where we are.
It’s not enough. But right now, with his body against mine and his hand in mine and the whole city white and quiet outside, it feels close.
“Sasha?”
“Hmm.”
“When you — when your citizenship comes through and you come out.” He pauses. “Do you think about what happens after that? With us?”
Every day. Every single day.
“Yes,” I say.
“What do you think about?”
I tighten my arms around him. Pull him closer. He comes easily, his body fitting against mine like he was built to be here.
“I think about this,” I say. “Except without the hiding. I think about waking up with you and not worrying about who sees us leave the same room. Going to dinner and sitting on the same side of the table. Holding your hand because I want to and not because we’re in a locked penthouse eighteen floors above the nearest person who could recognize us. ”
He’s quiet. His breathing has gone shallow.
“I think about your face,” I say, “when you stop being afraid.”
His grip on my hand tightens. His throat moves.
“That’s what I want too,” he says. “I just don’t know how to get there yet.”
“You will.”
“How do you know?”
“Because six months ago you couldn’t say boyfriend.” I kiss the side of his head. “Now you’re lying in a bathtub asking me about our future. Aaron Kelly, you are making very good progress.”
He laughs. Slightly unsteady, but real. “You sound like a therapist.”
“I sound like a man who’s been very patient.”
He shakes his head, but he’s smiling. That real smile. The one I had to earn.
The snow is easing outside the window. I can see it — the flakes getting thinner, the sky behind them shifting from solid white to pale gray.
Somewhere up there the clouds are pulling apart.
By tonight the airports will reopen. Sooner than I’d like, we’ll be back in Boston, back at Ashford, back to being co-captains who supposedly can’t stand each other.
I don’t say it. He can see it too.
The coffee arrives — a knock at the suite door, a tray left in the hallway. I climb out of the tub, grab a towel, and retrieve it. Two heavy ceramic cups, black, steaming. I bring them back to the bathroom and hand Aaron his.
He takes it with both hands, still in the tub, water up to his chest. He looks ridiculous — wet hair, flushed cheeks, drinking coffee in a marble bathtub in a penthouse in Manhattan.
“When we get back,” he says, blowing on the coffee, “it’s going to be hard. Going back to pretending.”
“I know.”
“I don’t want to.” He looks at me over the rim of the cup. “Just so you know. I’m not pretending because I want to.”
“I know that too.”
“I’m going to be better at this.” He says it with that stubborn jaw, that Aaron Kelly determination that makes him hell on the ice. “At saying what I want. At being honest. I’m not going to go backward.”
I lean against the edge of the tub. Look at him. Wet and serious and stubborn as hell.
“I know,” I say. “You won’t.”
He holds my gaze for a long moment. Then he reaches out, hooks his wet fingers into the towel around my waist, and pulls me toward the tub.
“Get back in,” he says.
I get back in.
The coffee is strong. The water is hot. Outside, the snow is slowing down.
His back finds my chest again. My arms find his waist. He tips his head against my shoulder and drinks his coffee and watches the city come back into focus through the clearing storm, and I hold onto him because I can. Because right now, nobody knows where we are.
And someday — soon — that’s going to be true everywhere.