Chapter 32
Sasha
Two months.
Two months since Valentine’s Day. Since the gala, since the dance, since Aaron pulled me up two flights of stairs and into his bed and said stay like it cost him a lung.
And nothing has changed. The hockey season is over now.
Another record-setting year for the Ashford Sentinels, thanks to its two warring captains — as far as the public knows.
I fold a shirt. Set it in the suitcase. Fold another.
The dorm room looks the same as it always has — bare walls, bare desk, bed stripped to the mattress pad. Four years in this room and there was never anything to take down. No posters. No photos. Nothing that said someone lives here except the hockey bag in the corner.
I should feel something about leaving. Nostalgia, maybe. Sentimentality. Four years in one room — that’s supposed to mean something, isn’t it? People cry about this. They take photos of their dorm rooms and post them with captions about the end of an era.
I fold another shirt.
The knock is soft. Two taps.
My hands still on the shirt.
I could pretend I’m not here. The hallway is quiet — mid-April, a Thursday afternoon, most of the floor either in class or at the library cramming for finals. Nobody would know he came. Nobody would see him leave.
I open the door.
Aaron is in a t-shirt and joggers, backpack over one shoulder like he just came from class. His hair is doing the thing it does in spring — the humidity curling the ends. Green eyes. That jaw.
My chest does the thing. It always does the thing. Almost two years and my body still hasn’t gotten the message that wanting him is the easy part.
“Hey.” He shifts the backpack strap. Glances past me into the room. “Can I come in?”
I step aside. Don’t say anything. He walks in and I close the door.
He sees the suitcase open on the bed. The empty closet. The desk cleared of everything except my laptop and passport.
“You’re packing already?”
“Flight’s Saturday.”
“Saturday — that’s two days from now.” He sets his backpack down. Leans against the desk. His eyes move around the room like he’s trying to catalog what’s missing, but there was never anything here to miss. “When do you get back?”
“Less than a month.”
“And you’re — you’re skipping the rest of classes?”
“I emailed my professors. Communications majors don’t have finals. I have two papers left. I’ll submit them from Omsk.”
He nods. Too fast, too many times. The Aaron nod — the one that means he’s processing something that makes his stomach hurt and he needs his head to be doing something while it catches up.
“And graduation?”
I pull a pair of jeans from the dresser drawer. Fold them. Set them in the suitcase.
“What about it?”
“You’re not coming back for it?”
“No.”
“Sasha —”
“I walked at Avangard’s youth academy ceremony when I was seventeen.
They gave me a certificate and a handshake and my mother didn’t come.
” I keep folding. Jeans, joggers, a hoodie.
My hands know the motions. “A ceremony is a ceremony. I’ll have the degree, and the Titans drafted me out of Ashford.
That’s the only reason I came here in the first place. ”
He’s quiet for a moment. I can hear him breathing — the slightly faster rhythm that means he’s choosing his words carefully, the way he does when he’s afraid of saying the wrong thing. Aaron Kelly, always afraid of the wrong thing.
“I got the email this morning,” he says. “From the registrar.”
I look up.
“Valedictorian.” A small, careful smile. The modest one — the one where he’s proud but won’t let himself show it because Aaron Kelly doesn’t brag unless I force him to. “Official confirmation. All that organic chemistry actually counted for something.”
“Of course it did.” And I mean it. I know how much being valedictorian means to Aaron. How much making his parents proud of him means to him. “You worked for it. You earned it. Congratulations.”
“Thanks.” He rubs the back of his neck. “My mom cried on the phone for ten minutes.”
“Good. She should cry. Her son is the smartest person at this school.”
“That’s definitely not true.”
“It’s true enough.”
He smiles. A real one, for a second. Then it fades, because he can feel it — the temperature in this room.
The thing that’s different. I’m talking to him and my voice is normal and I’m saying the right words, but something is missing and he knows it.
He’s always been able to feel when I pull back, even when I’m standing right in front of him.
“You okay?” he asks. Quiet. “You seem — different.”
Different. That’s one word for it.
“I got news too,” I say. I pick up the passport from the desk. Russian Federation. My name in Cyrillic on the inside, the photo from when I was eighteen — skinnier, no stubble, eyes too wide for the face. Four years of carrying this thing like a leash. “My lawyer called yesterday.”
Aaron straightens. His whole body shifts — shoulders pulling back, chin coming up, the way he does on the ice when the puck drops and everything sharpens.
“And?”
“May first.” I set the passport down. “I’m officially an American citizen on May first. The ceremony is May tenth — that’s when I get my new American passport. This trip home is the last one I’ll take with this Russian one.”
His face changes.
Not slowly, not in stages — all at once.
The careful, guarded expression he walked in with just breaks open.
His eyes go wide. His mouth opens. His hand comes up to cover it, and then drops, and then he’s crossing the room in two steps and his arms are around me and he’s holding on so hard my ribs creak.
I don’t move. For a second, I just stand there with Aaron Kelly’s arms locked around my back and his face pressed into my neck and let myself feel it.
The heat of him through his t-shirt. The way his fingers grip the fabric between my shoulder blades.
His breath, warm and fast against my collarbone.
This. This is what I wanted. Not the passport. Not the ceremony. Not the piece of paper that says this country will let me stay. I wanted this — Aaron’s arms around me, Aaron’s joy against my skin, Aaron knowing what it means without being told.
My arms come up. I hold him back. Close my eyes.
“Sasha.” His voice is muffled against my shoulder. “God. You did it.”
“Not yet. But by this time next month, it will be official.”
“You did it.” He pulls back just enough to look at me, and his eyes are shining — wet, bright, the green gone vivid the way it does when he stops controlling everything.
His hands are on my face now, thumbs against my cheekbones, and the look he’s giving me is so open and unguarded that my chest aches with it.
“You earned this. Everything you went through — the visa, the waiting, Diego’s bullshit, all of it. You earned your dream.”
My throat is tight. I swallow against it.
“Yeah,” I say. “I did.”
He pulls me in again. Holds on. His heartbeat is fast against my chest — I can feel it through both our shirts, slamming like he just finished a shift. His hand slides up to the back of my head, fingers in my hair, cradling my skull the way I’ve taught him to. The way that means I’ve got you.
We stand there. The room is quiet. Afternoon light through the single window, dust motes in the air, the suitcase open on the stripped bed behind me. His arms around me. My face in his hair.
I count his heartbeats against my sternum. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
Then he pulls back. Takes a breath. And I watch it happen — the thing I’ve watched a hundred times. His face locks down. Whatever he was feeling a second ago, gone.
“Well,” he says. Steps back. Half a grin, the lopsided one he uses to defuse a room. “Lily really missed out, huh? You don’t need her for that green card marriage anymore.” He shoves his hands in his pockets. “Would have really pissed her dad off, though. That was half the appeal.”
It’s a joke. Any other day, I’d laugh. He’s good at this.
I don’t laugh.
His grin falters.
“Come on.” He nudges my arm. “You know Coach would have had an aneurysm. Captain marries his daughter? The headlines alone —”
“Aaron.”
He stops. My voice does it — the flat, low register that I almost never use with him. The one without the charm. Without the accent I lean into when I’m flirting, without the warmth I can’t help when he’s close. Just my voice, stripped down, saying his name.
Not Aaron Kelly. Just Aaron.
His hands come out of his pockets. The grin is gone.
“I need you to hear me,” I say. “Not the joke version. Not the version where we laugh about it and then I get on a plane and we pretend everything is fine until I come back.”
“Okay.” Barely audible. “I’m listening.”
I sit on the edge of the bed. The bare mattress pad, the suitcase at my hip.
I look at my hands. They’re steady. I’ve been thinking about this conversation for weeks — longer, maybe.
Since Valentine’s Day. Since the dance floor.
Since Aaron pulled me into his bed and said stay and then spent two months acting like it never happened.
“When I come back from Russia,” I say. “I am going to be an American citizen. I am going to have an American passport. And the thing that has kept me in the closet for four years — the only thing — will be gone.”
He’s standing by the desk. Three feet away. His arms are crossed now, tight against his chest, and I can see the tension in his forearms. The way his jaw is set.
“I know,” he says.
“Do you?” I look up at him. “Because I need you to understand what that means. Not in theory. Not eventually. In less than a month.”
“I know what it means, Sasha.”
“It means I’m done hiding.” I hear my own voice — calm, steady, certain.
The voice I use when something has already been decided and the discussion is just a formality.
“As soon as I’m officially an American, I go public.
Tell my agent and my sponsors and my future team and the whole sports world I’m bisexual.
That’s not a threat. It’s not an ultimatum. It’s just what’s happening.”
His throat moves. A hard swallow. His eyes haven’t left mine.
“And I need you to think about what that means for you. For us.” I fold my hands between my knees. “While I’m in Russia. Less than a month. You have less than a month to decide what you want.”
“I know what I want.” It comes out fast. Almost desperate. His fingers are digging into his own biceps. “I want you. You know that.”
“I know you want me in a locked room with the doors closed.” My voice doesn’t crack. I won’t let it. “I know you want me in text messages at 2 AM when nobody can hear. I know you want me in hotel rooms where we have to leave separately and hours apart.”
His face goes white. Not red — white. The blood just drains.
“That’s not fair.”
“It’s true.”
He flinches. His hands drop to his sides and then come back up — running through his hair, gripping the back of his neck, the way he does when his body needs to be doing something and his brain hasn’t caught up yet.
“What if I told them.” His voice cracks on told. “My parents. While you’re gone. What if I just — told them.”
My hands stop on the shirt.
I look at him. Green eyes, wet. Hands shaking at his sides. He means it. Right now, standing in my stripped-down dorm room with my suitcase half-packed between us, Aaron Kelly means every word.
“Don’t.” I fold the shirt. Set it in the suitcase. Pick up the next one. “Don’t say that because I have a plane ticket.”
“That’s not why I’m saying it—”
“You’re saying it because I’m standing here telling you I’m done hiding, and you want to give me something so that you know I’ll still be there for you when I come back to this country.
” I fold. Crease, flatten, stack. My hands know what to do even when the rest of me doesn’t.
“That’s not the same thing as being ready. ”
His mouth opens. Nothing comes out.
“When you’re ready to tell them, you won’t be asking me what if.” I don’t look up. “You’ll just do it.”
The room goes quiet. The hallway outside. Someone’s music, two floors down. His breathing.
“I’m not asking you to come out with me,” I say. Quieter now. “I can’t make that choice for you, and I wouldn’t. But I need you to understand that I can’t keep doing this. The hiding. The distance. Pretending in public that you’re just my rival on the ice and nothing more.”
“We’re more than that.” His voice shakes. “You know we’re more than that.”
“I know what we are to each other at midnight with the doors locked. I don’t know what we are at noon on a Tuesday.
” I stand up. Cross to him. Stop close enough to touch him and don’t.
“Think about it. Really think. Not what your family wants. Not what your church expects. Not what the fans or the sponsors or the scouts need you to be. What do you want?”
His eyes are wet. He blinks. Once, hard. His jaw is clenched so tight I can see the muscle jumping.
Say it. Say don’t go. Say stay here with me. Say you’ll be standing next to me on May second.
He doesn’t say it.
“I’ll think about it,” he says.
My chest caves. Not visibly — ten years of learning how to take a hit. My face doesn’t change. My shoulders don’t drop.
“Okay,” I say.
I turn back to the suitcase. Pick up the shirt I was folding when he knocked. Finish the fold. Set it inside.
He stands there for a long time. I can feel him behind me. The heat. The silence. Him working up to it.
He doesn’t find it.
“Sasha.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll be here when you get back.”
I turn around.
He’s standing by the door. Backpack over one shoulder again, hand on the strap, chin up. Trying so hard to look steady. Trying so hard to be enough.
“Will you though?” I say. “In the way I need you to be?”
His chin drops. His eyes go to the floor. He stands there — just stands there — and the silence tells me everything.
He doesn’t look up.
The door opens. The door closes.
I fold the next shirt. And the next. And the next.
The Russian passport sits on the desk. Less than a month, and I never have to carry it again.
Less than a month. And then I find out if Aaron Kelly is brave enough to carry me instead.