Chapter 35
Aaron
My lungs are burning and I can’t outrun any of it.
Three days since I told my parents. Two and a half weeks since Sasha got on a plane. Both silences feel the same — heavy, unresolved.
So I run.
Hartley at dusk. The route I’ve been running since junior year — campus loop, down past the athletic center, through the neighborhood streets where the houses get smaller and the sidewalks crack.
My sneakers hit pavement in a rhythm that almost passes for calm if you don’t notice the pace, which is too fast, and the breathing, which is too hard, and the fact that I’ve been running for forty minutes and I’m not slowing down.
My parents haven’t called. Three days. My mom, who calls if I miss a single text, who notices everything, who has a face for every occasion — she hasn’t called.
My dad hasn’t called. Caitlin texted me a heart emoji the morning after and nothing since.
Mary’s been sending me memes, which I think is her version of support. Colin and Sean — nothing.
I told them the truth and nobody has said a word since.
And Sasha. Two and a half weeks of nothing.
The silence I asked for, the silence he’s honoring, the silence that’s killing me.
I don’t know what’s happening in Omsk. I don’t know if his mother has been cruel to him.
I don’t know if he’s sleeping, eating, skating with Maksim, thinking about me, or if the distance has given him exactly what he needed to realize he’s better off without a man who can’t even say the truth out loud.
Except I did say it out loud. Three days ago. To the people who matter most.
And none of them have called.
My phone buzzes in my armband.
I slow. Stop. Bend over with my hands on my knees, breathing hard, sweat running down my temples. The streetlight above me flickers. Somewhere on the next block a sprinkler hisses across a lawn. I pull the phone out with shaking, damp fingers.
Sasha.
Not a text. A call. His name on my screen.
My heart is already slamming from the run. Now it slams harder.
I answer. Press the phone against my ear. Try to control my breathing and fail.
“Hey.” It comes out wrecked. Breathless.
“Aaron Kelly.” His voice is low and rough. The cold has gotten into it. “Are you dying?”
“I’m running.”
“At this hour?”
“It’s eight o’clock here.”
“You sound like you’re being chased.”
“I’m not being—” I straighten up. Wipe my forehead with the back of my wrist. “Where are you?”
“Outside. On the street. It’s — late. Three, maybe.” A pause. Wind, thin and high. “It’s still snowing. April in Omsk.”
“Why are you calling?” Not harsh. Just — surprised. We don’t call. That’s the rule — texts only, always. A phone call is two people on a line at the same time, and that’s dangerous. “We have rules.” My heart is hammering and it’s not from the run. He called me. He actually called.
“I broke the rules.” He says it simply. Without apology. “I went to see my father today.”
My throat tightens. He doesn’t talk about his father. In all the time we’ve been together, he’s mentioned him maybe three times.
“I went to the cemetery,” he says. “Cleaned the snow off the stone. It’s smaller than I remembered.
Everything here is smaller than I remembered.
” His voice catches — a hitch, a rough edge that smooths immediately.
“I stood there and thought he would not recognize me. His son who left Russia and became famous and sends money home like a machine. He wouldn’t know me. ”
I sit down on the curb. Right there on the street, sweaty and shaking, legs stretched into the gutter. I press the phone against my ear and listen to him breathe six thousand miles away.
“He’d know you,” I say. “Sasha. He’d know you.”
“You didn’t know him.”
“I know you.”
Wind. Footsteps. The crunch of snow under his shoes. Omsk at three in the morning.
“Something happened with Olga.” His voice shifts. More careful. Like he’s handling something fragile. “She couldn’t sleep. I was in the kitchen — wearing your hoodie, by the way.”
My chest aches.
“She sat with me and she told me why she pulled away. After my father died. She said I look like him — the jaw, the way I move. ” He pauses. “She said she was proud of me. She asked about you. If you make me happy.”
“What did you say?”
“I told her I love you.”
The words hit my sternum. He said it to his mother. In a kitchen in Omsk, in my hoodie, he told Olga he loves me.
“She could see everything that was happening between us from the photos and the commercials. She knew everything.” A sound close enough to a laugh to hurt. “My mother. She knew the whole time.”
I close my eyes. Sweat is cooling on my skin. The sprinkler hisses. A car passes at the end of the block, headlights sweeping across the houses. My heart is pounding even harder now. Maybe it’s not too late. Maybe I haven’t lost Sasha.
Tell him. Tell him you sat at the table and said the words.
Not yet. Not on a phone. He needs to see it.
“I love you,” I say instead. “I should have said it before you left. I should have said it two months ago. I should have said it on Valentine’s Day when you danced with me in front of two hundred people and I just stood there.”
“Ya tebya lyublyu.” Almost a whisper. Then in English: “I love you. I love you, Aaron.”
My face is wet and I don’t know if it’s sweat or tears and I don’t care.
I’m sitting on a curb in running shorts with my heart trying to come through my ribs and the man I love is saying the words from the other side of the world and I can’t tell him what I did because this isn’t something you say on a phone.
This is something you say into a microphone.
“I need you to come back early,” I say.
“Aaron—”
“My valedictorian speech is May fifth. I need you there.”
“A graduation speech.” Skeptical.
“My graduation speech. I need you in the audience.”
He’s quiet. The wind picks up. I hear it howling past his phone and think about him on a frozen sidewalk, alone, processing.
“Too much has happened,” he says. The words come out rehearsed — something he’s been telling himself on that walk. “Between us. You want — you need things I can’t—”
“Sasha. Just come.”
“You don’t even know what you want. You said you’d think about it and—”
“I’ve done more than think.” My voice goes firm. The captain voice. “Trust me. Please. Come to the speech. If you come and you still think we don’t want the same thing, I’ll accept that. But come.”
Silence. Snow and wind and six thousand miles.
“Please come home early. For me.”
Another silence. But this one feels different.
A pause. Then, softer: “Okay. I’ll come.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
We stay on the line. Neither of us hangs up. I sit on the curb in Hartley with the streetlight flickering above me and my sweaty running clothes going cold against my skin, and I listen to him walk through snow on the other side of the world.
“I have to go,” I say. “I’m going to freeze to death on this sidewalk.”
“Good. Go inside. Drink water. Stretch.”
“Come home as soon as you can.”
“Goodnight, Sasha.”
“Good morning,” he corrects. “Almost four.”
“Go inside. Your mom’s going to worry.”
A pause. Surprised. Like that’s something he never expected to hear about Olga.
“Maybe she will,” he says. Soft. “Goodnight, Aaron Kelly.”
The line goes dead.
I sit on the curb. My legs are stiff. My face is a mess. The street is quiet. The sprinkler has shut off. Somewhere in Omsk, Sasha is walking home to a mother who surprised him. He’s coming back to me. And he doesn’t know what I’m going to do at that podium.
He’s going to find out at the same time as the rest of the world.
I stand up. Start running again. Slower this time. Steady. Breathing even.
Home. Shower. Sleep.
Just days until my speech. And then no more hiding from anyone.