Chapter 27
Aaron
I can’t stop seeing it.
The hit. The angle of his head. The way his body went loose before it hit the ice — not like a hockey player going down, bracing, tucking. Like someone who stopped being in their body mid-stride. The sound his helmet made on the ice. The silence after.
I’m pacing the hospital corridor like a caged animal and I can’t stop.
The floor is that scuffed beige linoleum that every hospital in America seems to buy in bulk.
The lights are too bright. There’s a vending machine against the wall and a row of plastic chairs I can’t make myself sit in and a TV mounted in the corner playing a muted rerun of something I don’t register.
It’s almost eleven. The game ended two hours ago.
Coach Rafferty is sitting in one of the plastic chairs, legs stretched out, arms crossed over his team polo. He hasn’t said much since we got here. Drove his own car to the hospital, told me to follow, didn’t ask why I wanted to come. Didn’t need to, probably. I’m the co-captain. It tracks.
Except I’m not here because I’m the co-captain.
“Kelly.” Rafferty’s voice is calm. The same voice he uses when a game is going sideways and the bench is panicking. “Sit down.”
“I’m fine, Coach.”
“You’ve been walking a trench in that floor for forty minutes. Sit down.”
I sit. The plastic chair is cold and uncomfortable and my right leg starts bouncing immediately.
My hands are clenched on my knees. I’m in a hoodie and jeans I threw on before rushing to the hospital, and there’s a smudge on my sleeve from when I knelt on the ice next to him.
From when I took my helmet off because I couldn’t see his face clearly through the visor and I needed to see his face.
I needed to see his face.
“He’s tough,” Rafferty says. Not looking at me. Looking at the wall opposite. “I’ve been coaching that kid for four years. He’s taken hits before.”
“Not like that.”
“No. Not like that.” He’s quiet for a second. “But the trainers said he was responsive in the ambulance. Talking. Being difficult.” A ghost of a smile. “That’s a good sign.”
The door to the exam area opens and a nurse comes out and my whole body goes rigid, but she walks past us toward the desk. Not for us. I exhale. My hands are shaking.
Get it together, Kelly.
Another twenty minutes. Rafferty scrolls through his phone.
I stare at the vending machine and think about the way Sasha’s eyes looked when I got to him on the ice — unfocused, searching, like he knew someone was there but couldn’t figure out who.
Then they found me and his face changed. Not relief exactly. Recognition.
Like I was the only thing that made sense.
The door opens again. A doctor this time — young, tired, clipboard. He looks at Rafferty, not at me.
“Coach Rafferty? He’s got a concussion. Grade two. No fracture, no bleeding — the CT looks clean. We’d like to keep him overnight for observation, but he’s —” The doctor pauses with the expression of a man who has just argued with Sasha Vorontsovsky. “He’s insisting on leaving.”
“Of course he is,” Rafferty mutters. He stands. Looks at me. “I’ll talk to him.”
He disappears through the door. I sit in the plastic chair with my bouncing leg and my shaking hands and wait.
Five minutes. Rafferty comes back out, jacket in hand.
“He’s signing himself out.” He shakes his head. “Stubborn as hell. Says he’s got family visiting for the holidays who can keep an eye on him.” He gives me a look — steady, unreadable. “Make sure he gets back to campus. I’ll check on him in the morning.”
“Yes, Coach.”
He claps my shoulder on his way past. “He’s going to be fine, Kelly. Get some rest yourself.”
I nod. Wait until I hear his footsteps fade down the corridor. Then I push through the door.
Sasha is sitting on the edge of an exam table in a hospital gown, signing papers on a clipboard, and he looks terrible.
Not terrible. He could never look terrible.
But the bruise forming along his left temple is dark and swollen, spreading toward his eye socket, and there’s a scrape across his cheekbone from the ice.
His hair is matted and tangled and he’s squinting under the fluorescent lights like they’re personally attacking him.
He looks up when I walk in.
“Aaron Kelly.” The grin is immediate. Slower than usual, a little lopsided from the swelling, but there. “You came to the hospital.”
“Yeah.”
“With Coach Rafferty.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s very bold of you.” He signs the last page and hands the clipboard to a nurse who takes it without comment. “Somebody might get the idea you have a crush on me.”
“You got hit in the head and carried off the ice on a stretcher and that’s what you want to talk about?”
“I wasn’t on a stretcher. I walked to the ambulance.”
“You did not walk to the ambulance. You were helped to the ambulance and you couldn’t walk in a straight line.”
“I could walk in a mostly straight line.”
There’s humor in his voice. Of course he isn’t going to take this seriously.
“Sasha.” I sigh.
“It’s a concussion, Aaron Kelly. I’ve had concussions before. In Russia we get concussions before breakfast.”
“That’s not funny.” God, he’s infuriating.
“It’s a little funny.” He winces as he shifts on the table.
The hospital gown is ridiculous on him — too short, the ties loose in the back, his long legs hanging over the edge.
He looks like a college kid who got into a bar fight, not a Division I athlete with a grade two concussion. “Stop looking at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m dying. I’m not dying. My head hurts and the lights are too bright and I want to go home.”
“The doctor wanted you to stay overnight.”
“The doctor can want many things.”
“Sasha.” I step closer. Lower my voice. “How many fingers am I holding up?”
He looks at my hand. “Three.”
“Is your vision blurry?”
“Only when I look at the lights.”
“Nauseous?”
“Only when I look at the fluorescent lights.”
“I can do both. I’m very talented.” He slides off the exam table. Sways once — barely, just a hitch in his balance that he corrects fast — and I step forward without thinking, my hand on his arm. He looks down at my hand. Then up at me.
“See?” he says, quieter. “Crush.”
“Shut up.” But I don’t take my hand off his arm. “You lied to them. About having family in town.”
“I wasn’t going to stay here overnight. The bed is terrible.”
“So who’s supposed to watch you? You can’t be alone with a concussion.”
He tilts his head. That half-grin, even with the bruise darkening around his eye. “If you’re really worried, Aaron Kelly — you can babysit me tonight.”
I’ve never been inside Sasha’s dorm room.
In over a year of whatever this is — sneaking around, locked doors, hotel rooms, the back seat of his car once at 2 AM in an empty parking lot — I have never set foot in the place he actually lives.
Too risky. Too close to the team, the athletic housing, the people who would notice Aaron Kelly going into Sasha’s room and not coming out.
It’s past midnight when we get there. The building is quiet — it’s the weekend and most of his dormmates are still out partying, probably. I walk three steps behind him down the hallway because habit is habit, even at midnight in an empty building.
He unlocks the door. Hits the light.
The room is empty.
Not empty like no one’s home. Empty like no one lives here.
A bed, neatly made. A desk with a closed laptop and one textbook.
A closet. A mini fridge. No posters. No photos.
No evidence that a person with a history and a family and a life exists in this space.
His hockey bag is slumped in the corner.
It’s the most personal thing in the room.
I knew Sasha kept things simple. I didn’t know he kept things this bare.
“Home sweet home,” he says, dropping onto the bed with a groan. He changed at the hospital, moving slow and careful. The bruise has spread. His left eye is starting to swell shut.
I close the door behind me. Look around again. The walls are white and bare and the overhead light is harsh.
“You could at least hang a poster or something.”
“Of what?”
“I don’t know. Anything. A hockey player. A band. A naked woman — you like those, I remember you telling me.”
“College is just me counting down the days until I get to my real dream — New York City and pro hockey.” He eases back against the pillow and closes his good eye. “I won’t be here much longer.”
The Titans. New York. The life he’s actually building toward. This room is just a place to sleep. He’s already halfway out the door.
I pull his desk chair to the side of the bed and sit down.
“So,” I say. “You want to tell me what happened out there?”
His good eye opens. “You saw what happened. I got hit.”
“You got hit because you didn’t see him coming. You always see them coming.”
He’s quiet for a moment. The bravado dims, just a fraction.
“I was in my head,” he says.
“About what?”
“Everything. You. Us. The citizenship. Coming out after graduation.” He stares at the ceiling. “I was thinking about scoring the goal and what it would look like on SportsCenter and what it would feel like to do it next year in a Titans jersey with you in the stands knowing you’re mine.”
My chest tightens. “That’s a lot to think about during a game.”
“I know.” He exhales. “I got careless. I was so sure everything was falling into place that I stopped paying attention to what was right in front of me.” One side of his mouth pulls up, even with the swelling. “Very poetic. Very stupid.”
“Mostly stupid.”
“Thank you, Aaron Kelly. Your bedside manner is exceptional.”
We’re quiet for a minute. The dorm is silent around us — no footsteps in the hall, no music through the walls, just the heating system clicking.
“I need to tell you something,” I say.
He turns his head on the pillow. His good eye finds me. “Okay.”
“Meghan knows. About us.”
He doesn’t react the way I expected. No tension, no alarm. Just a slow blink and a careful, “How?”
“She saw us at the airport. In the hallway. When you — when we kissed before you left for your car.”
“Ah.” He processes this. “And?”
“And I told her everything. She came to see me the next day and I — I told her how it started, what it is. All of it.”
“What did she say?”
“She wasn’t upset, except for the fact that I didn’t tell her sooner. She said she’d keep the secret.” I look at my hands. “She was mostly shocked that it was you. My rival.”
Sasha laughs. It’s small — the concussion makes everything smaller — but genuine. “I like this Meghan.”
“You’ve never even met her.”
“I like anyone who is supportive of you. What can I say, I’m biased.” He shifts on the pillow, settling deeper. “Aaron. This is a good thing.”
“How is getting caught kissing you at an airport a good thing?”
“Because you told someone. You let someone in.” His voice is softer now. Tired. The concussion pulling at the edges. “Not long ago you would have panicked and denied everything. You didn’t deny it. You sat down and told her the truth.”
He’s right. I know he’s right. It doesn’t make it less terrifying.
“It’s one person,” I say.
“It starts with one person.” His hand moves across the bed. Finds the arm of the desk chair, then my wrist, then my hand. His fingers close around mine. “Thank you for telling me.”
“You should rest.” I squeeze his hand. “The doctor said it’s okay to sleep. I’ll wake you up in a couple hours to check on you.”
“You’re staying?”
“That’s the whole point of babysitting.”
His mouth curves. The swelling makes it uneven. “And here I thought you just wanted to see my bedroom.”
“Your bedroom is depressing.” I scan the room. No college student lives in a room so clean and spare, not even me. I actually own stuff.
Sasha waves a hand dismissively. “It has everything I need.”
I raise an eyebrow. “It has a bed and a fridge. That’s not everything.”
“It has you in it right now.” His good eye is getting heavy. “That’s an upgrade.”
I don’t say anything. I hold his hand and watch his breathing slow.
The bruise is ugly — dark and swollen, already going purple at the edges — and under the harsh overhead light he looks younger than twenty-two.
Smaller than the guy who skates out under the lights and makes seven thousand people chant his name.
I reach over and switch off the desk lamp. Then I get up, hit the overhead light, and sit back down in the dark. The only light is the faint glow from the parking lot through the window, casting pale rectangles on the bare walls.
His breathing goes even and slow.
I sit in the chair next to his bed in his empty room and watch him sleep.
The room is bare and cold. Just a standard-issue dorm bed and white walls and a mini fridge humming in the dark. But Sasha said it — it has me in it. That’s enough.
I’m not going anywhere.