Chapter 30
Sasha
Meghan waves from her doorstep. The porch light catches the sequins on her dress, and she holds there for a second — keys in hand, glancing back at the car like she knows something is about to detonate and doesn’t want to be in the blast radius.
Smart woman.
She goes inside. The light in her front window flicks on.
Aaron pulls away from the curb before the door is fully closed.
The car lurches forward — too fast, tires biting the pavement, the kind of acceleration that belongs on the highway, not a residential street in Hartley at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday night.
His hands are locked on the steering wheel at ten and two, knuckles white, jaw set so hard I can see the muscle jumping beneath his skin.
We’ve been sitting in silence since the three of us left the gala.
Twelve minutes. Meghan in the backseat, filling the dead air with bright, careful small talk that neither of us answered.
She kept going anyway — bless her — all the way to her apartment, narrating traffic patterns and complimenting the string quartet like she hadn’t just watched Aaron short-circuit on a dance floor.
Now it’s just us. And the silence is bad.
“You want to slow down?” I keep my voice neutral. Observational. The voice I use when everything inside me is on fire and I need Aaron not to know that.
He doesn’t slow down.
“What were you thinking?” His voice comes out strangled — too high, too tight, the vocal equivalent of his grip on the steering wheel. “What the hell were you thinking, Sasha?”
“I was thinking—”
“You walked into that event knowing exactly what you were going to do. In front of everyone. Our teammates were in that room. Our coach was in that room.” He takes a corner too fast and I brace against the door.
“And you — you just — fifteen thousand dollars? In front of everyone? Do you have any idea—”
“Aaron—”
“You’re a Russian citizen.” He says it like he’s reading charges. “You are a Russian citizen on a student visa with a citizenship application pending, and you just made a public spectacle of yourself with another man at a charity event that had photographers—”
“I know what I—”
“It’s probably already online. Someone probably posted it before we even left the building.
Some donor’s wife with a phone and a gossipy social media account, and now there’s a photo of Sasha Vorontsovsky slow-dancing with Aaron Kelly on Valentine’s Day, and do you understand what that looks like?
Not to me — to the wrong person? To immigration?
To someone back in Russia who decides to make a phone call? ”
He’s spiraling. I can hear it — the way the sentences are getting longer, piling on top of each other, his breath not quite keeping up with his mouth.
He’s not angry at me. He’s terrified for me, and the terror is coming out as fury because Aaron Kelly doesn’t know how to be scared without turning it into a weapon.
I reach over and put my hand on his.
Not his arm. Not his shoulder. His hand — the one gripping the steering wheel so tight his tendons are standing out like cables. I lay my palm over his knuckles and press down. I can feel the tremor running through his fingers.
“We can fight about this all you want,” I say. “But not here. Not while you’re driving like this.”
His foot eases off the gas.
“Take us to your house.”
His head turns. Just a fraction — eyes still on the road, but his focus shifts to me in the passenger seat, and the anger on his face cracks just enough for confusion to leak through.
“What?”
“Your house.” I leave my hand where it is. “It’s Valentine’s Day. All of your roommates will be out.”
“You — Sasha, we’re not just going to—”
“If you’re going to pick a fight with me on Valentine’s Day for wanting to dance with you, I at least want to see where you live.” I let that sit for a second. Let him hear it. “All of this time, and I’ve never even seen where you sleep.”
His expression shifts. The anger doesn’t disappear — it’s still there, coiled and hot — but I can see it cracking.
The same thing I saw on the dance floor when his forehead dropped to my shoulder and his fingers slid into my hair and he stopped pretending, for thirty seconds, that he didn’t want exactly this.
He turns left on Maple Street.
Aaron parks in the driveway and kills the engine. The silence is immediate. Just his breathing and mine in the dark interior of his car.
He doesn’t look at me. He opens his door and gets out.
I follow.
The front door sticks slightly — he shoulders it open with the practiced ease of someone who’s done it a thousand times.
Inside: a narrow hallway, high ceilings, dark wood trim.
Coat hooks overloaded with jackets. A shoe pile by the door that’s been recently straightened. The smell of old wood and coffee.
He walks past the stairs, past the living room — I catch a glimpse of two couches, a mounted TV, the casual disorder of four athletes sharing a space — and into the kitchen.
He flips on the overhead light. Under the kitchen light he looks flushed and intense, the color from the dance still high on his neck.
He’s never looked more like someone I want to pin against a wall.
He shrugs off his suit jacket. Drapes it over a chair. Rolls his sleeves with sharp, deliberate motions, and I watch the tendons in his forearms flex and think he’s gearing up. Round two.
“You had no right.”
There it is.
He turns to face me, leaning against the kitchen counter with his arms crossed.
Behind him, a window over the sink frames the dark backyard.
A fridge covered in takeout menus and a magnetic bottle opener.
The whole room is functional and slightly worn, and Aaron stands in the middle of it like a soldier defending a position.
“You had no right to walk into my life and do that without telling me. Without asking. You just — decided. For both of us.”
“Aaron—”
“I have a plan.” He pushes off the counter, pacing the narrow kitchen, his dress shoes loud on the old linoleum. “I have a system. I know who knows what, I know what’s visible, I know what’s safe. And you just took that system I live by and lit a match to it.”
I watch him pace. Three steps one way, three steps back. The kitchen isn’t big enough for a man this wound up, and his body knows it — his shoulders narrowly miss the doorframe every time he turns.
“What about when everybody at Ashford sees that dance in photos and video online?” He stops, facing me. “What if our sponsors see this? Of course they’re going to.”
“I thought about all of that.”
“When? While you were handing your credit card to the emcee?”
“Before. Weeks before.”
That stops him. His pacing halts mid-stride, one hand braced on the back of a kitchen chair.
“Yes.” I take off my own jacket. Set it on the table next to his, carefully, because I need my hands busy so they don’t reach for him. “I knew exactly how to have my Valentine’s dance with you and control what people would think of it. And Diego is already on it.”
“Diego?”
“He’s putting it out to the press tonight.
Sasha Vorontsovsky bids on his college rival at a charity auction — hilarious Valentine’s Day stunt, great for the foundation, perfect rivalry content.
” I lean against the kitchen table. Mirror his posture, arms crossed, three feet between us.
“By morning, every sports blog and hockey account will be running the joke angle. Diego is thrilled. He thinks I’m a marketing genius. ”
Aaron stares at me. His arms loosen, just slightly — the defensive posture starting to crack.
“You talked to Diego.”
“Before I walked into the gala. I told him what I was going to do, and I told him how to spin it. The story is already written, Aaron. The room saw exactly what I needed them to see.” I hold his gaze. “Two rivals. A joke. A very generous donation to youth hockey.”
“And the dance?”
“The dance was for me.”
The kitchen is quiet. Somewhere in the old walls, a radiator clicks and settles. Aaron’s arms drop to his sides — not a surrender, not yet, but the fight is draining out of him in real time.
“I didn’t want to spend another Valentine’s Day without you.”
I say it simply. No performance, no deflection, no charm. Just the truth, standing in his kitchen at midnight, close enough to touch him and choosing not to because tonight I need him to come to me.
His jaw works. His eyes are wet — not crying, not yet, but the sheen is there, the surface tension holding.
“You could have just told me.”
“You would have said no.”
“I would have said it was too dangerous.”
“Same thing.”
He turns away from me. Both hands on the edge of the counter, his head dropping forward, every muscle in his back locked tight. I can see his breathing — the expansion of his ribs, the way his shoulders lift and fall, uneven, stuttering.
And I’m standing in it. Leaning against his kitchen table on Valentine’s Day in a suit that cost me more than I’d ever admit, and all I want is for him to turn around.
“I’m not sorry,” I say quietly. “I’ll apologize for the risk. I’ll apologize for not letting you in on my plan. But I’m not sorry I danced with you.”
His shoulders shake. Once. A single tremor that runs through him, and then he’s still again.
He turns around.
The anger is gone. All of it. What’s left is Aaron without armor, standing in his kitchen in his rolled-up sleeves with his hair falling across his forehead, and the look on his face is the one I saw on the dance floor when the alarm behind his eyes shut off and he let himself lean into me. Open. Unguarded. Wanting.
He crosses the three feet between us.
His hand finds my wrist. Not my hand — my wrist. His fingers wrap around the bone, pressing into my pulse point, and I feel the contact like voltage.
His thumb settles against the place where my heart hammers, and I know he can feel it.
I know he knows I’m not as calm as I look. I’ve never been as calm as I look.
He doesn’t say anything. He pulls.
Gently. Deliberately. Toward the hallway, toward the stairs, his fingers sliding from my wrist to my hand, threading through mine.
I follow him through the hallway. Past the living room with its dark TV and empty couches.
Up the main staircase to the second floor — doors closed on all sides, rooms dark, the house dead silent around us.
Then a second staircase, narrower, steeper.
A door at the bottom that Aaron opens. Another door at the top.
Two doors. He doesn’t make it easy.
He opens the second door and pulls me through.
The room is small. Sloped ceilings cutting into the space on both sides, two dormer windows at the front letting in the glow of a streetlight through bare branches.
A desk under one window, a neatly made bed against the far wall, a closet built into the eaves.
It smells like him — clean, subtle cologne, a trace of menthol from muscle rub — and it’s so neat it makes my chest ache.
He let me in here. That’s not nothing.
He’s still holding my hand. His back is to me, his face turned toward the dormer windows, his breathing ragged. The kind that comes after you stop holding it in.
I step closer. Press my chest against his back. Wrap my free arm around his waist and hold.
He exhales. His whole body drops — shoulders, spine, all of that tension he’s been carrying — and he leans back into me with the full weight of his surrender.
I close my eyes. My mouth finds the back of his neck, the soft skin above his collar, and I breathe him in and feel my own hands shaking and think: I could lose this.
So easily. One wrong step, one wrong headline, one phone call from a bitter actual hockey rival who knows too much, and everything we’ve built in the spaces between disappears.
But not tonight.
He brought me here. I’m not letting go of that. I’m not letting go of him. Whatever comes tomorrow — the press, the spin, the fight we’ll have again in the morning when the fear comes back — it doesn’t get to have tonight.
Tonight is ours.
And tomorrow I’ll fight for every night after it.