9 - Aiden
Aiden
“Are you gonna tell me what this is, or should I start thinking about an emergency exit strategy?”
I kept my eyes on the narrow drive between rows of corrugated metal doors and killed the engine. Sodium lights threw a dull wash across the asphalt. The place always looked abandoned at this hour, which was exactly why I liked it.
“If I answered that,” I said, stepping out and locking the car, “it’ll defeat the purpose.”
She circled around the hood, arms folded against the bite in the night air. “You brought me to a storage facility. This is either deeply boring or deeply psychotic.”
“Have some faith.”
“In you?”
“That would be a good place to start.” I started walking, and Sage hurried to keep up.
“You do realize this is how a lot of documentaries begin?”
“Relax,” I said. “I left my ski mask at home.”
She exhaled a quiet laugh that worked its way up my spine. Thank God she couldn’t tell.
The facility was a grid. Identical doors. Identical locks. Fluorescent lights that flickered overhead with all the warmth of a hospital hallway. I wove through two rows, then cut down a third. I could feel her watching everything, cataloging exits, distances, the rhythm of my stride.
“You should at least give me a category,” she called ahead. “Crime of passion? Financial ruin? Secret second family?”
“You watch too much TV.”
“On a night like tonight, I think TV’s gonna be the thing that saves me.”
We reached the far corner where the units backed up against a chain-link fence. Mine was halfway down, wedged between someone’s forgotten furniture and a door with a new lock that probably guarded nothing but holiday decorations.
I stopped in front of it.
She looked from the number stenciled above the door to me. “If there’s a dead body behind that door…”
“This isn’t where I keep the bodies.”
I crouched to unlock the padlock, and the metal clicked open in my hand just as Sage gasped. She slapped my shoulder, pretending she wasn’t impressed with my dark humor, but I knew better.
“What’s wrong?” she asked when I didn’t lift the door immediately. There was no way for her to know why I’d hesitated.
Back at the record store, bringing her here had seemed like a good idea. It felt bold. Standing here now, though, with the padlock in my hand and no way to backtrack, I was more exposed than I’d ever been.
“We don’t have to do this.” It was as if she could read my mind, and I appreciated the gesture. “I wasn’t really in the mood for dead bodies, anyway.”
I gave the door a hard tug, the rollers rattling overhead. Fluorescent light blinked a few times, then snapped on.
For a beat, she didn’t move.
Then she stepped past me.
The unit was organized in a way that would’ve surprised anyone who had seen my apartment.
A long workbench ran along the left wall.
Tools hung above it in careful rows, outlines traced in pencil so I knew where each one belonged.
A table saw sat near the center, blade lowered.
Clamps lined a pegboard, and planks of walnut and maple were stacked on a rack against the right wall.
Half-finished pieces rested on a secondary bench at the back, a chair frame waiting for its seat, a narrow console table sanded down to a pale sheen.
She walked in as if she were entering a gallery. Her hand glided over the edge of the console table, then paused at the curve of the chair’s backrest. She studied the joints where the wood met, fingers tracing the seam where I had spent three nights getting the angle right.
“You…?”
I waited for the rest of her question, but Sage seemed too distracted with everything, so I just said, “Yeah.”
She moved deeper inside, taking her time with each piece. She crouched to inspect the legs of a small side table, pressed her thumb against the grain as if testing for flaws. I stayed near the entrance and just watched.
“My apartment’s too small,” I said, feeling the need to fill the silence. “No garage. No space to make a mess without living in it. So now I rent this, and get to mess around without worrying about any of that other stuff.”
She straightened, turning in a measured circle to take it in from every angle. “You come here a lot?”
“Most nights. After practice, or when I can’t sleep.” I stepped inside and let the door rest halfway open behind us. “It’s quiet, and there’s no clock.”
She ran her palm across the workbench, stopping at a block plane. “Your work’s really good. And I’m not just saying that.”
Sage never just said anything, so it warmed me up inside to hear the compliment.
“It’s my fallback if this hockey thing doesn’t work out,” I said, a dry, humorless laugh escaping me.
She only half-acknowledged it, then walked toward a tall bookshelf frame propped against the back wall. Her fingers rested along the edge, testing the balance. “You did the joinery by hand.”
“Mostly. Also, how did you know that?”
She glanced over her shoulder. “My eye for detail isn’t limited to fine art. This qualifies as art too. A little obsessive with the joinery, but still.”
“It’s precise.”
“That’s what obsessive people would call it.”
I moved closer, standing on the other side of the shelf so the frame sat between us. “What’s the verdict?”
She considered, eyes scanning the unit again, taking in the order of it. The care.
“Okay, fine,” she said. “You win.”
“Win what?”
“Your adventure is better than mine. Happy?”
Relief rolled through me in a way I didn’t let show.
I wanted her impressed. I wanted her to understand there was more to me than skates and contracts and a lease that renewed month to month.
Bringing her there hadn’t been about showing off.
It had been about letting her see something I didn’t let most people near.
To bear witness, I suppose, on a version of me that was more than hockey.
“Are you just buttering me up because you’re relieved I’m not some psycho maniac?”
“That’s a huge part of it,” she said, a slight smile curling her lips.
Her gaze dropped to a sketch pinned above my workbench, a rough drawing of a dining table I hadn’t started yet. She studied it, then looked back at me.
“So what’s the plan?” she asked. “Retire at forty, and open a furniture empire?”
I shook my head. “I don’t need an empire. Just something that’s mine. An escape.”
She held that, and I could see the calculation behind her eyes. She was filing it away, adjusting whatever story she had told herself about me.
“You’re not who I thought you’d be,” she said.
“In a good way, or bad?”
Sage narrowed her eyes, pretending to think really hard as she studied me. “Undetermined.”
“That’s generous.” I laughed, fixing the array of tools on the bench.
“Call it ongoing research.”
I smiled at that. “You’re always this thorough?”
“Only when it matters.”
The words hung there between us, weighted with more than either of us was willing to unpack.
I reached past her to grab a tape measure from the bench, careful not to crowd her. My hand came close to her hip before I redirected, and the proximity shifted the air in the unit.
“You aren’t measuring anything,” she said.
“I know.”
“Then why pick it up?”
“Needed something to do.”
She studied me with an expression that bordered on understanding. “Because you get uncomfortable when the attention’s turned on you.”
“I get cautious.”
“Same difference.”
I set the tape measure down. “No, it’s not. You don’t know what I have to deal with on a daily basis, okay.”
She tilted her head. “So explain. Tell me.”
I glanced around the unit, at the pieces in various stages of becoming something else. “On the ice, attention means performance. In here, it just means I make something worth looking at. Those aren’t interchangeable.”
She moved closer. “Do you play to prove you deserve your spot,” she asked, “or because you know it’s where you belong?”
The question didn’t come out as an attack. It came out as curiosity sharpened by experience.
“Why can’t it be both?”
Her gaze didn’t waver, and neither did my resolve. I’d been doing this for years, asked myself the same questions over and over again.
“Aiden—”
“Why tattoos?” I turned it back on her.
In the time we’d spent together, I’d noticed more than a few similarities about the way we did things, approached our work, thought about life. Maybe the only way to make her understand was to use her own situation as an example.
Her posture stayed steady. “Because I love it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” No hesitation.
There was none on my part either. “And you’re sure it’s not because you’re trying to prove to everyone else you’re an artist?”
Sage glared at me. I’d crossed a line, and there would be no going back now.
“I know what I like,” she said.
“That wasn’t the question.”
She gave a small breath through her nose. “You think I’m trying to prove something.”
“I think everyone does sometimes.”
She stepped back toward the center of the unit, putting distance between us. The light from the open door caught the edge of her hair. She looked composed, but her hands were busy now, flexing once before settling at her sides.
“We’re not that different,” I said.
She looked at me again. Unconvinced.
“We both make the most of what we’ve got,” I continued. “We build careers around pressure. We perform. We adapt.”
“I’m nothing like you,” she said. “Our worlds are very different. The choices we have to make are—”
“Just admit it,” I said, cutting her off. “It doesn’t matter how hard you deny it, Sage, but you’re guilty of the same thing you just called me out on.”
Silence settled in the space without either of us filling it immediately. Somehow, without even trying, we’d stumbled into enemy territory. Too close for comfort. Too real to go on pretending we were never here.
“I think we play ourselves as hard as we play anything else,” I continued. “Because admitting what we actually want feels riskier than chasing what we already know how to survive.”
Her jaw tightened slightly. Little did she know that I was as unprepared for this as she was. My initial plan was to share something with her that nobody else knew, not to venture into an even deeper secret world we had in common.
“You don’t get to define my motives,” she said then.
“I’m not defining them.”
“Yes, you are.”
I moved toward her. Not close enough to reach out, but hoping to get there without her flinching from my touch. “I’m asking if you’re sure.”
She didn’t answer, and that was the first real crack in the conversation.
She turned toward the door, walking that direction without announcing it. The shift was subtle, but I felt it. The edge of withdrawal.
I reached out and caught her wrist before she’d reached the threshold. Her body halted instantly, attention snapping back to me.
“Aiden,” she said.
The sound of my name carried more weight than anything we’d said in the last ten minutes.
I didn’t think about the next step. I didn’t calculate it. I didn’t weigh it against consequences.
I just gave her wrist a tug.
She came with the motion, surprised but responsive, and the distance between us disappeared in one decisive movement.
Her eyes widened as I lowered my head.
There was no buildup. No warning.
I brought my mouth to hers and kissed her hard, cutting off the conversation, cutting off the doubt, and everything that had been circling between us since I’d sat down in that chair at Purple Rose.