Chapter 38
Sasha
No warning — just a text that said I’m in Hartley, expect me any minute now and then his black Audi was in the driveway and he was standing on the porch in a linen blazer and loafers looking at the peeling paint on the front door like it personally offended him.
“This is where you live?” he said.
“This is where Aaron lives. I moved in — at least for a little bit longer until we both have to go to preseason training in New York.”
“Together.” He looked at the house. At the sagging porch. “Romantic.”
Now he’s on the couch in the living room with his laptop open and his phone faceup on the armrest and a cup of coffee Aaron made him in a mug that says ASHFORD HOCKEY: UNDEFEATED IN THE LOCKER ROOM, which was a graduation gift from Cooper and is the only clean mug in the house.
Aaron is in the armchair across from him.
I’m leaning against the doorframe because the other couch has three boxes of Robertson’s stuff stacked on it and nobody’s moved them yet.
The living room is half-empty. The TV is still mounted on the wall but the game console is gone.
There are rectangles on the walls where posters used to be.
The whole house looks like what it is — a group of guys who are done here, scattering to different cities, different teams for those of us who are lucky enough to be going pro, different lives.
Except two of us aren’t scattering. Two of us are sitting in the wreckage of a college rental listening to our agent tell us how bad the damage is.
“Okay.” Diego sets his coffee down. He’s in work mode — the version of Diego that talks fast and doesn’t blink.
“Here’s where we are. Three sponsors confirmed out.
The sports drink, the athletic wear, and the shaving cream brand — that one I’m still technically in conversation with but they’ve ghosted me three times and I know what ghosting means. ”
“It means they’re cowards,” I say.
“It means they’re assessing risk. Which is cowardice with a spreadsheet.” He taps something on his laptop. “Two more I’d call nervous. They haven’t pulled but they haven’t confirmed the fall campaigns either. They’re waiting.”
“For what?” Aaron’s voice is quiet. He’s got his legs pulled up in the armchair, arms around his knees.
“For the news cycle to tell them what to think.” Diego shrugs. “That’s how brands work. They don’t have opinions. They have data. Right now the data is mixed, so they’re frozen.”
“Okay,” I say. “What else.”
“The good news.” Diego leans forward. His eyes change.
This is the other Diego — not the one doing damage control, the one who sees a play developing.
I’ve watched this face on him before. He had it the first time he pitched us the rivalry campaign in his New York office, leaning across a conference table with his sleeves rolled up, selling us on the idea that two college hockey players hating each other could be worth millions.
He has that face now.
“I’ve gotten eleven — eleven — inbound inquiries in the last four days from brands that want to work with you. Not separately. Together. As a couple.”
Aaron looks up.
“The rivalry is dead.” Diego spreads his hands.
“Obviously. You killed it from a podium in video that’s gone viral all over social media, which — and I mean this with love — was not how I would have handled the brand transition.
But it’s done. And the story that’s replacing it?
Two athletes who hid their relationship behind a fake rivalry, one of them gives a valedictorian speech coming out and declaring his love?
” He pauses. Lets it land. “That story is bigger than anything I could have manufactured.”
A moving van rumbles past outside. Someone on the street yells something about a mattress.
“What kind of brands?” Aaron says.
“Luxury. Lifestyle. A car company — a real one, not some regional dealer. A clothing line. Two LGBTQ-focused organizations that want you as ambassadors.” Diego is scrolling his laptop now, pulling up emails, turning the screen toward us.
“There’s a morning show that wants an exclusive interview.
Not sports media — network morning show. National audience.”
“That’s the TV thing you mentioned,” Aaron says.
“That’s the TV thing. And it’s first. Before anything else, we do that interview, we control the narrative, and everything after follows from the story we tell.” Diego looks at both of us. “This isn’t damage control anymore. This is a relaunch.”
I look at Aaron. He’s watching Diego with that expression I know — the careful one, the one where he’s calculating whether to trust what he’s hearing. He’s trying to figure out if Diego is actually hopeful or just telling him what he wants to hear.
“Diego.” I push off the doorframe. “Can I ask you something?”
“Always.”
“Did we kill our ability to make the kind of money that makes you want to represent us by coming out? Or do you think there’s still hope for us to keep supporting our families this way?”
The room goes quiet. Aaron’s eyes flick to me. Diego closes his laptop. Slowly. He sets it on the thrift-store couch next to the expensive watch and the hockey mug and he looks at me.
“There’s a ton of money to be made in you two as a couple,” he says.
“I’m not going to bullshit you — the opportunity is real.
The brands that dropped you were never going to be the long-term play anyway.
What’s coming in now is bigger. Better. If I make the right moves, and I will, you’re going to come out of this making more than you were before. ”
He picks up the hockey mug. Takes a sip. “Don’t let the negative press make you give up on this. The money is there. I just need you to trust me to go get it.”
“We’re twenty-two,” Aaron says. “We own a Mr. Coffee and ambition.”
He opens his laptop again. Starts pulling up the timeline — the interview first, then the photo shoots, then the fall campaigns. His hands are moving and he’s full throttle, building something new out of the pieces of what broke.
I watch Aaron’s face while Diego talks. His shoulders are dropping. He’s starting to look like he believes it.
My phone buzzes on the kitchen counter. I ignore it. Diego’s is lighting up every thirty seconds and he’s ignoring it too, all three of us in this half-empty living room with the moving boxes and the bare walls, planning a future that didn’t exist two weeks ago.
Outside, another van pulls away from the curb. Someone honks. The street keeps emptying.
Diego’s on his second cup of terrible coffee and he’s drawing a timeline on the back of a takeout menu and Aaron is leaning forward in the armchair now, asking questions, engaged, his voice steadier than it’s been in days.
I watch him across the room — my boyfriend, in his own living room, planning his life out loud and meaning it — and my chest does the thing.
It always does the thing.
We’re going to be fine, I think. And I believe it.