Chapter 29
Aaron
The lacrosse captain goes for forty-five hundred dollars.
Not bad. The crowd claps, a woman in a red cocktail dress claims her prize, and Brennan — six-three, jaw like a Greek statue, dumb as a bag of hammers — offers her his arm with a bow that nearly sends him off the edge of the stage. The ballroom laughs. The emcee moves on.
I adjust my tie in the wings and watch the next guy step into the spotlight.
Ashford’s basketball power forward, a junior named Davis who’s already sweating through his collar.
The bidding starts low. Two women near the front get into a polite war over him, paddles flashing, and Davis grins like he’s just been told he’s going first overall in the draft.
The Hartley Youth Sports Foundation Winter Gala is in full swing around us — crystal chandeliers, champagne towers, donors in black tie filling the ballroom at the Ashford faculty club.
Valentine’s Day. The whole room is draped in deep red and gold, roses on every table, a string quartet in the corner that’s been playing Sinatra standards since cocktail hour.
This is the same gala where Austin Nash and Wyatt Tate danced together six years ago. Made the front page of the Hartley Herald. The whole campus talked about it for weeks. But Austin and Wyatt were out.
I don’t.
Meghan finds me backstage, two champagne flutes in hand. She’s in a black dress, hair pinned up, looking like she belongs here more than I do.
“You nervous?” She hands me a glass.
“It’s a charity auction, Meghan. Not a firing squad.”
“You keep fixing your tie.”
I drop my hand. She’s right. I’ve been tugging at it for the last twenty minutes, adjusting something that doesn’t need adjusting because my hands need something to do.
“You’re going to be fine.” She clinks her glass against mine. “Some lovely donor’s wife is going to bid a very generous amount for the privilege of dancing with you, you’ll be charming for three and a half minutes, and then we can go find the dessert table.”
“That’s the plan.”
“That’s the plan.” She squeezes my arm. “I’ll be in the third row. Try not to trip on your way up.”
She disappears back into the ballroom, and I take a sip of champagne that does nothing for the tightness in my chest. Two more guys before me.
I roll my shoulders, crack my neck. This is fine.
This is easy. I’ve stood in front of fifteen thousand people at Sentinel Ice Arena and taken a faceoff with the game on the line.
A roomful of rich people in evening wear is nothing.
Davis sells for three thousand. The crowd applauds. The emcee — a local radio host with a voice that fills every corner of the room — calls the next name.
Then mine.
“Ladies and gentlemen, our next bachelor needs no introduction — Ashford’s own team captain, number seventeen, Aaron Kelly!”
I step out. Lights hit my face. The applause is warm, and I find my stage smile without thinking — the one that’s been getting me through press conferences and alumni dinners since junior year.
I lift a hand. Wave. The emcee rattles off my stats, my major, something about “Boston’s most eligible,” and I let it wash over me while I scan the room.
Meghan, third row, giving me a thumbs-up behind her champagne glass.
Coach Rafferty at a table near the back, arms crossed, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else but showed up because he always shows up.
Teammates scattered through the crowd — a few of them heckling from the bar, because of course they are.
Faces I don’t know. Donors. Alumni. Parents of kids in the youth hockey program.
Normal. Safe. Everyone exactly where they’re supposed to be.
“Let’s start the bidding at one thousand dollars!”
A paddle goes up near the front. Then another. The numbers climb — two thousand, three, four. The emcee plays it up, works the room, and I stand there with my hands in my pockets and my smile locked in place and feel almost relaxed.
Five thousand. Six. Two women are going back and forth, and the crowd is enjoying it, and this is fine. This is the whole point — raise money for a good cause, dance with a stranger, go home.
“Six thousand — do I hear seven? Seven thousand from the lady in blue! Do I hear—”
“Ten thousand.”
The voice comes from the back of the room.
My body knows before my brain does.
Every nerve ending fires at once — like the split second before a hit you didn’t see coming.
My vision tunnels. The ballroom shrinks to a single point somewhere past the last row of tables, where a figure is standing with one hand raised and the other tucked casually in his pocket, like he does this every day. Like he belongs here.
Dark gold hair. That stance. That's all I need.
No.
“Ten thousand dollars from the gentleman in the back! We have a new bidder, folks!”
The emcee is delighted. The crowd stirs — heads turning, murmurs rippling through the tables.
I can hear the shift in energy, the curiosity, but I can’t process any of it because my lungs have stopped working and my smile is still frozen on my face and Sasha Vorontsovsky is standing in the back of the Hartley Youth Sports Foundation Winter Gala on Valentine’s Day, bidding on me.
The woman in blue counters. Eleven thousand.
Sasha doesn’t hesitate. “Fifteen thousand.”
The ballroom goes silent. Then the noise hits — gasps, a few sharp laughs, someone at the bar letting out a low whistle.
The emcee stares at Sasha for a full beat before recovering, leaning into his microphone with a grin that’s half disbelief.
“Fifteen thousand dollars! Now that’s what I call competitive — fitting, since I’m told these two have quite the rivalry on the ice! ”
He planned this. He planned this and didn’t tell me because he knew — he knew I would have told him to stay away.
My face is doing something. I don’t know what.
I can feel muscles working, can feel the expression I’m holding in place, but I’ve lost the connection between my brain and my body.
I’m smiling. I think I’m smiling. The audience seems to think I’m smiling, because they’re laughing, enjoying the spectacle.
No one counters. At fifteen thousand, no one is going to counter.
The gavel comes down.
“Sold! To the gentleman in the back — let’s get these two on the dance floor!”
The applause is huge. I hear it the way you hear sound underwater — distant, warped.
My feet carry me off the stage. The crowd parts.
And then Sasha is walking toward me, weaving between tables with that easy, unhurried stride, and he’s wearing a charcoal suit I’ve never seen before with no tie, top button undone, and he looks —
I can’t see anything else.
The string quartet shifts into something slow. Couples are already drifting toward the dance floor for the Valentine’s set, and the emcee gestures us toward the center with a flourish, still riffing on the rivalry angle, and I can’t hear a word of it because Sasha is right in front of me now.
Close enough to touch. Close enough that I can see the way his eyes are steady and warm and looking at me like I’m the only person he came here to see.
Because I am.
His hand extends. Palm up. Waiting.
My fingers close around his before I’ve decided to move.
He pulls me in. One hand settles on my waist — firm, sure, His other hand holds mine, fingers interlocking, thumb pressing into the space between my knuckles.
My body fits against his the way it always does. Muscle memory. Traitor.
“What do you think you’re doing?” The words come out low, barely a breath, my mouth close to his ear so no one else can hear.
His chest vibrates with a quiet laugh. “Dancing with you, Kelly. I paid fifteen thousand dollars for the privilege.”
“You —” I don’t have the air for a full sentence. “You can’t just —”
“I told you.” His mouth is near my temple. I can feel the warmth of the words against my skin. “I’m hooked on seeing you in a suit. I wasn’t missing another opportunity.”
“This isn’t funny, Sasha.”
“I know.”
Two words. The humor drops out of his voice. What’s left is raw and unprotected. He’s not performing. He’s not spinning this. He’s just here, holding me.
We move. I don’t know who’s leading — my body is following his without permission, the way I follow him on the ice, anticipating the shift before it comes. His hand tightens on my waist. My fingers curl into the fabric of his jacket at the shoulder.
“Breathe,” he says softly.
I realize I haven’t been. I pull in air, shaky, and it tastes like his cologne and the champagne on his breath and the roses on every table.
“People are watching.”
“People are always watching.” His thumb moves against my hip — small, hidden, devastating. A circle, barely an inch of motion, that no one in this room can see but I feel everywhere.
His hand is on my waist and my heart is trying to come through my ribs.
“You’re shaking,” he murmurs.
I am. I can feel it — a fine tremor running through my arms, my hands, the muscles in my back that are working overtime to hold me upright. I’m shaking, and he’s steady. He’s always steady.
“I’ve got you.” His hand presses firmer against my lower back. Not pulling me closer — just holding. Anchoring. “I’m right here.”
I know. That’s the problem. That’s the whole problem — you’re right here and I want you to be right here and I can’t have this. Not like this. Not where people can see.
But my body doesn’t listen. My body leans in.
My forehead drops to the space between his neck and his shoulder — half an inch of contact, barely anything, the kind of thing that could pass for an awkward dance partner adjusting his footing.
But it’s not that. It’s me pressing my face into the warm skin above his collar and breathing him in and giving myself three seconds of something I’m not allowed to want.
He doesn’t stiffen. Doesn’t pull back. His hand moves up my spine — one slow stroke, knuckles trailing between my shoulder blades — and then settles again at my waist.
And something in me just — stops.
The alarm — the constant math of who’s looking, how close is too close — goes quiet. And in the silence there’s him.
The warmth of his chest against mine. His heartbeat — I can feel it against my chest, a steady rhythm that’s faster than he’s letting on.
He’s not as calm as he looks. His body is telling me what his face won’t.
His pulse is hammering against my collarbone and his breathing has gone shallow and his fingers are pressing into my waist hard enough to leave marks through the fabric.
Good. I want the marks. I want proof this happened.
My hand moves from his shoulder to the back of his neck.
My fingers slide into the hair at his nape — the dark gold, always too long, soft against my knuckles — and I feel him inhale.
Sharp. Controlled. The breath of a man holding himself very, very still because if he moves he’ll do something the room can’t unsee.
I don’t care. Right now, with the cello vibrating through his chest and his cologne in my lungs and his thumb drawing circles on my hip — I don’t care. I want this. I want him.
Let them see. Let them see and let them wonder and let it be worth it for once, just this once, let something be worth the fear.
His jaw grazes my forehead. Stubble catching skin — barely a touch, an accident of proximity, except nothing about Sasha is accidental. His lips are close enough to my hairline that I can feel his breath. He’s not kissing me. He’s just there.
The string quartet plays. We’re barely moving. I can feel the music through his chest. I don’t want to be anywhere else.
“This is what it could feel like,” Sasha says.
He says it so quietly I almost miss it. No humor. No deflection. Just a fact, laid bare between us, offered without pressure.
This is what it could feel like. In a room full of people. With his hand on my back. With nothing between us.
The music changes.
He steps back. His eyes hold mine for one more second — blue, steady, asking nothing — and then his mouth curves into that public smile, the one the cameras know, the one that says just a bit of fun and nothing to see here and everything underneath it that only I can read.
“Good game, Kelly.” His voice is back to performance volume. Loud enough for the tables nearby. “Best fifteen grand I ever spent.”
The crowd laughs. Someone whoops. The emcee is already calling the next bachelor, the moment folding into the next moment, the evening continuing as if nothing happened.
I’m standing in the middle of the dance floor in a ballroom full of people and my hands are empty and I can’t breathe.
Sasha turns back toward the crowd. I watch him go — the easy stride, the dark gold hair catching the light.
And I’m standing here, and it was everything.
Knowing I wanted one more song.
Knowing he’s still somewhere in this room, and I have to get through the rest of the night pretending I don’t want to follow him out.