Chapter 3
Aaron
The penthouse is ridiculous. Floor-to-ceiling windows on two walls, the whole city lit up on one side, Central Park dark on the other. A sunken living room. A fireplace. A full bar with luxurious leather stools.
This is a hotel room. This is what Diego booked for Sasha while I got the eighth floor and a view of other buildings.
Sasha steps inside first. I follow, because my legs are moving and my brain has stopped supervising them, and I stand in the middle of this ridiculous, enormous, beautiful space and try to look unimpressed.
“This is…” I trail off. I walk toward the windows because they’re pulling me and because looking at the city is safer than looking at him. “Big. It’s big.”
Sasha laughs. I didn’t mean it to be funny.
“You’re jealous,” he says.
“I’m not jealous.”
“Your jaw looks awfully tense.”
“My jaw isn’t doing anything.” I unclench it as I say this. We both hear it click.
He doesn’t push. He just walks up beside me at the window — close, close enough that I can feel the warmth radiating off him — and looks out at the skyline like it’s his. Like the whole city is something he ordered and it arrived exactly as requested.
“The park is better in the morning,” he says. “All the green, and the light coming through the trees.”
“You haven’t seen it in the morning. You just got here.”
“I’m going to see it in the morning. I’m an optimist.”
I almost smile. I kill it. But he’s watching, the way he always watches, and I know he saw.
The light from the buildings casts across us both. I can see our reflections in the glass — him tall and easy beside me, me with my shoulders up around my ears, my hands shoved in my pockets.
“You have the most unusual eyes,” he says. Quiet. “Green with gold in them. Like nothing I’ve ever seen.” He turns to face me fully. “You’re so handsome, Aaron.”
My face goes hot. “I — thank you.”
I say it to the window. I say it to the city. I say it to anything that isn’t his face, because his face is too close and too beautiful and looking at it directly is making my heart pound in a way I can’t ignore.
“Aaron.” His voice is quieter than I’ve heard it. “I want to kiss you.”
The air leaves my lungs. My eyes drop to his mouth before I can stop them — his lips, slightly parted, the shadow of stubble along his jaw — and my whole body tingles. Not the restless shifting from before. The tingling intensifies and my heart is pounding.
I don’t say no.
I don’t say yes.
He cups my face with both hands. His palms are warm against my jaw, his fingers curving behind my ears, tilting my face toward his. We’re so close, my breath is warm against his lips.
And then he kisses me.
Soft. Slow. His mouth against mine, and suddenly I’m kissing him back. In response, the pressure of his lips against mine intensifies.
My mouth softens against his. My lips part and I breathe into the kiss and the sound that comes out of me — quiet, desperate — surprises us both.
His hands tighten on my face. He tilts my head and deepens the kiss and I let him — I’m letting him — my body swaying forward. My hands come up and grip the front of his shirt. Not pulling. Not pushing. Just holding on.
He pulls back.
I stand there with my eyes half-closed and my hands still raised, still shaped around fistfuls of shirt that aren’t there anymore, and for three full seconds I don’t move.
“I — that — I’ve never done that before.” The words fall out. My hand goes to my mouth. “With a guy. I’ve never — I don’t know what I’m doing.”
He smiles — slow, flirtatious, like I just handed him a gift. “You were doing fine.”
“I should go.” I step backward. “I have an early flight, and I should probably —”
“Aaron.”
“I don’t know what that was. I’m not — I mean, I don’t usually —”
“Aaron.”
I stop. Chest heaving. He holds up both hands — not touching, not pushing — and grins at me. Wide and easy and deliberately absurd.
“Wait,” he says. “Don’t move.”
He pulls his phone from his pocket and music hits the room like a wall.
Russian pop — loud, driving, a woman’s voice belting over a beat that belongs in a Moscow nightclub at three in the morning. The bass throbs through the floor. I stand there with my wrinkled shirt and stare at him.
“What are you doing?”
“Don’t go.” He walks back to me, loose, rolling his shoulders to the beat, and holds out both hands. “We can just dance.”
“I don’t know how to dance.”
“Of course you can.” He catches my hands before I can stop him. His fingers are warm and his grip is light, easy to break if I wanted to break it. I don’t break it. “If you can move on the ice, you can dance. Your body already knows how — you just won’t let it.”
He pulls me into the center of the room and rests his hands on my waist and we sway.
Not really dancing — I’m terrible at this, stiff and awkward and hyperaware of everywhere his body meets mine.
But the music is so loud and so ridiculous and he’s moving with such unselfconscious joy that the tightness in my chest gives.
He spins me once and I stumble and catch myself against his chest — my hand flat against his heartbeat, his face inches from mine — and he grins and steps back and I laugh. Actually laugh.
“Can you turn the music off?” I’m shouting over the bass. “I can’t hear myself think.”
He crosses the room and kills the volume and the silence rushes in.
“Well,” he says, walking back toward me, hands in his pockets. “If you don’t want to dance, what do you want to do?”
I should probably tell him.
We’re on the bed — him leaning back on his hands, watching me, amused, utterly at ease.
He’s down to his underwear and I’m down to mine.
His chest is defined, his stomach flat, a pale trail of hair disappearing below the waistband.
Dark blond waves pushed out of his face.
He looks like someone who has done this before. Many times.
I don’t know what I’m doing.
“I should probably tell you —” I start, and he leans forward and presses his mouth to the center of my chest, just below my collarbone, and every thought in my head goes dark.
His lips feel so good on my skin. He moves them slowly to the left, kissing along the ridge of muscle, and the breath that comes out of me is shaking.
“Tell me what?” he murmurs against my skin.
“I haven’t — I’ve never —” His mouth moves lower and his breath fans warm across my nipple and my brain short-circuits. “I don’t have a lot of experience.”
He pulls back. “With men?”
“With anyone.” The words are out before I can stop them. “Meghan — my girlfriend. Ex-girlfriend. We didn’t. She wanted to wait until marriage.”
A beat of silence. Then he laughs.
It’s not cruel — bright and startled and warm — but it cuts through me anyway.
“And you must have been so relieved,” he says.
His face is pure amusement — eyes bright, mouth curved, not a trace of judgment.
The heat in my face is instant. I pull back. “Don’t laugh at me.”
His grin softens. He reaches for me, his hand curving around the back of my neck, and draws me toward him. I resist for exactly one second before my body gives in.
“I’m not laughing at you,” he says. His thumb traces the knob of my spine at the base of my skull.
“I think you’re brave to tell me.” He pauses.
“I figured out I liked men when I was fifteen. A teammate, at the hockey academy. Very quiet, very secret. In Russia, you don’t talk about it.
” He meets my eyes. “Too dangerous.” He says this the way he says everything about his past — clean, no drama.
“But I like women too. And being a hockey player has brought a lot of very beautiful women into my life.” The grin comes back.
“I’m bisexual. I’ve known for a long time.
So you don’t have to be nervous with me. ”
I stare at him. He just told me something that would end careers in most locker rooms the same way he’d tell me what he had for breakfast.
“My uncle Jonathan was a priest,” I blurt out. “My mom’s brother. He left the church about ten years ago. Came out. Moved to Chicago with his partner.”
Sasha’s thumb pauses on my spine. He doesn’t say anything. Just waits.
“My parents don’t talk to him. My mom — she just stopped.
Like he died. His name doesn’t come up at Sunday dinner.
His Christmas card goes in the trash.” My voice is steady but my hands aren’t.
“So when you say I don’t have to be nervous — I appreciate that.
But you don’t know my family. They are really religious. ”
He nods. No judgment. No speech about how I should live my truth. He just takes it in.
“As I’m sure you know, in Russia people like us have to worry about much more serious things than just family judgment, though there’s plenty of that,” he says.
“Which is why I came to America.” His thumb starts moving again.
Slow circles on my spine. “Since I was a teenager, I’ve known what I want.
Play hockey in New York. Become an American.
Be out. Have someone who loves me, and that I love back.
” He says it the way he says everything — like it’s already decided.
“And someday, a place outside the city. Somewhere quiet where the rest of the world can go to hell.”
“That’s an ambitious plan.”
“I am an ambitious person.” He runs his fingers through my hair, slow, his eyes holding mine. The touch is so gentle it makes my breath catch.
He kisses me. Slow and deep, his tongue sliding against mine, his hand on my jaw.
“Lie back,” he says. “We go slow. I want to make you feel good. That’s all. Just let me.”
I lie back. The sheets are cool against my skin. Sasha is above me — broad shoulders blocking out the city light, his body lean and hard, his hands hooking into the waistband of my underwear. He pauses. Looks at me.
I lift my hips.
He peels them down and I’m naked. Completely naked, on a bed in a penthouse in New York, with a man, and my cock is hard and straining and there’s nowhere to hide.