Chapter 18 #2
“You’ll be grateful when we’re standing outside in minus-twelve-degree weather.”
I’d known it was cold and it wasn’t like I wasn’t used to it, but that was a whole new level. “Minus twelve? Are you trying to kill me?”
He chuckled. “Celsius. Minus twelve Celsius. That’s…” He did a quick calculation. “Ten degrees Fahrenheit or something? The telescope requires steady hands. Hard to have those when you’re shivering.”
Ah, okay. Yeah, that made more sense. Still cold, but nothing I couldn’t handle. He’d bundled up too, though somehow, he managed to look elegant rather than ridiculous in his winter gear. We headed out onto the small deck, and the cold hit like a physical force, making me gasp.
But then I looked up.
“Holy fuck,” I breathed.
The sky was impossible. Where I was used to seeing maybe a dozen stars on a clear night in Buffalo, here, there were thousands.
Millions. They spread across the darkness in layers and clusters, some bright and sharp, others so faint, they only appeared in my peripheral vision.
And cutting across it all, unmistakable even to my untrained eyes, was a river of light.
“Is that…?”
“The Milky Way,” Nils confirmed, his voice warm with pleasure. “Our galaxy, seen edge-on. Those billions of stars are just a fraction of what’s out there.”
I stood frozen, neck craned back, trying to process what I was seeing. How did people see this and not spend every night staring up? How had I gone twenty years without knowing this existed above me?
“Adan? You still with me?”
I realized I’d been silent for several minutes. “Yeah. Just… Holy shit. This is incredible.”
“Wait until you see it through the telescope.”
He’d already set up the equipment on a flat section of the deck, working with practiced efficiency despite the thick gloves. The telescope was smaller than I’d expected, but clearly high-quality, all matte black metal and precise adjustments.
“This is your small telescope?” I asked.
“The other ones aren’t exactly portable.” He made a final adjustment and stepped back. “Here, look at this.”
I bent to the eyepiece, and my world exploded.
What had been a fuzzy patch of light to my naked eye resolved into countless individual stars, so densely packed, they seemed to overlap and merge.
Colors I hadn’t expected—blues and reds mixed with white—and depths that made my brain hurt trying to comprehend the distance.
“That’s the Pleiades,” Nils explained, his hand warm on my back. “An open star cluster about 444 light years away. Those stars were all born from the same nebula.”
“What do you mean, born?”
And he was off, explaining stellar formation with the same passion he brought to hockey strategy. I asked question after question, genuinely fascinated by the vastness of it all. He showed me different objects: galaxies, nebulae, even Saturn with its rings visible as more than a dot.
“This one’s special,” he said, adjusting the telescope again. “The Andromeda Galaxy. The closest major galaxy to our own.”
I looked through the eyepiece at what seemed like another fuzzy blob, though bigger than the others. “How far?”
“About 2.5 million light years. The light you’re seeing right now left those stars before humans existed. Before our species even evolved.”
The concept made me dizzy. “So we’re literally looking back in time?”
“Always. Even the light from the sun takes eight minutes to reach us. We never see anything as it is right now, only as it was.”
“That’s…” I straightened up to look at him. “Kind of beautiful and sad at the same time.”
“How so?”
“Like, those stars could be gone already and we wouldn’t know. We’re seeing ghosts.”
His expression softened. “I never thought of it that way. Though some of these stars will outlive our sun by billions of years.”
“Still. It’s like being in a relationship with the past.”
Something flickered across his face at that, gone before I could identify it. “The past has its place. But I prefer to focus on the present.”
We stayed out for another half-hour, Nils showing me constellations and teaching me to find Polaris, the North Star.
His grandfather had taught him, he said, on dark winter nights in Sweden.
The reverence in his voice when he talked about those memories made me want to know everything about his childhood, his family, the life he’d lived before coming here.
Finally, the cold won. My fingers were numb inside the thick gloves, and I could barely feel my toes. We packed up the telescope and retreated inside, the warmth of the cabin hitting like a wall.
“Okay,” I admitted, stripping off layers as fast as my cold fingers would allow. “I get why you love this. That was amazing.”
“I’m glad you enjoyed it.” He was unwrapping his own scarf, cheeks pink from the cold. “I’ve wanted to share it with you for a while.”
“Since that first bus ride?”
“Since then, yes. You seemed so surprised that anyone would care about astronomy.”
“Because I was. Hockey players don’t usually have hobbies that require that much thinking.”
“That’s not true. You think constantly: about plays, positioning, strategy.”
“That’s different.”
“Is it? Understanding the ice and understanding the sky both require pattern recognition, spatial reasoning, patience.”
I finished pulling off my snow pants and moved closer to the fire. Nils joined me, and we stood side by side, hands extended toward the flames.
“Your fingers are freezing,” he said, taking my hands between his.
“Yours aren’t much better.”
But he rubbed my hands anyway, the friction and his touch slowly bringing feeling back. The intimacy of the gesture, standing together in the firelight while he warmed my hands, made my chest tight with emotion.
“Thank you,” I said quietly. “For all of this. The cabin, the stars, everything.”
“You don’t need to thank me.”
“Yeah, I do. No one’s ever done anything like this for me before.”
He was quiet for a moment, still holding my hands. “You deserve good things, Adan. You deserve someone who pays attention to what you want.”
“Is that what you are? Someone who pays attention?”
“I want to be.”
I turned our hands so I was holding his instead, pulling him closer. “You succeed.”
The kiss was soft, almost tentative, as if we were both aware of how perfect this moment was and afraid to break it. His lips were cold from outside but warmed quickly against mine. When we pulled apart, his eyes were dark in the firelight.
“Hungry now?” he asked, voice slightly rough.
“For food?”
“Among other things.”
“Food first,” I decided. “Then other things.”
He made pasta with ready-to-eat meatballs from the freezer and a simple red sauce, adding the fancy cheese he’d agonized over in the store. We ate at the small table by the window, snow beginning to fall outside, creating a scene so perfectly romantic, it felt like a movie.
“That’s amazing,” I said with my mouth full.
He chuckled. “I literally only boiled pasta and heated up the meatballs and sauce and added cheese.”
I shrugged. “Meals don’t need to be home-cooked or even fancy to taste good. It’s warm, it’s filling and it hits the spot. Works for me.”
We finished dinner, washing dishes together in comfortable domesticity. The snow was falling harder now, thick flakes that would make the drive tomorrow interesting. But that was tomorrow’s problem. Tonight, we had this cabin, this warmth, this rare privacy.
“Want to watch the fire?” Nils asked, but there was something in his tone that suggested he meant more than just sitting on the couch.
“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”
We settled on the thick rug in front of the fireplace, backs against the couch, shoulders touching.
The fire crackled and popped, casting dancing shadows around the room.
I could feel the heat from Nils’s body where we touched, could smell his cologne mixed with wood smoke and the lingering scent of dinner.
“This is perfect,” I said quietly.
“Is it?”
“Yeah. Being here with you, away from everything else… I wish we could do this all the time.”
“That would be nice.”
“No sneaking around, no watching our words, no pretending we’re just coach and player.”
He was quiet for a moment. “Is that what bothers you most? The pretending?”
I thought about it. “What bothers me most is not being able to tell people how amazing you are. Like, my teammates talk about their girlfriends or hookups or whatever, and I have to sit there knowing I’ve got something better than all of them combined, but I can’t say anything.”
“Better?” His voice carried amusement.
“Don’t fish for compliments. You know you’re incredible.”
“I’m really not.”
“Bullshit.” I turned to face him more fully. “You’re brilliant and kind and thoughtful and hot as fuck. You planned this entire perfect night because I mentioned once that I’d never seen stars. You make me want to be better at everything, not just hockey.”
His expression had gone soft and vulnerable in a way I rarely saw. “Adan…”
“I mean it. Every word.”
He leaned in and kissed me, deeper this time, with intent behind it. I responded immediately, shifting to face him better, one hand coming up to tangle in his hair. The kiss grew heated quickly, weeks of careful control and stolen moments pouring into this one opportunity for privacy.
“Upstairs?” I suggested against his lips.
I’d expected him to immediately take me up on the offer, but instead, he froze, then slowly retreated. His eyes were full of an emotion I couldn’t name, his face tight. Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong.
He took a deep breath. “We need to talk.”