Chapter 40
Sasha
Aaron Kelly is on his hands and knees in my living room and I’m not even enjoying it properly because he’s assembling a bookshelf.
He’s got the instruction sheet spread out next to him, a screwdriver between his teeth, and sweat darkening the back of his t-shirt in a V between his shoulder blades.
August in New York. No air conditioning yet — the unit is still in the box by the window where the delivery guy left it three hours ago.
The apartment is a fourth-floor walkup in the West Village and we carried everything up those stairs ourselves because I told Diego I didn’t need movers and Diego said you’ll regret that and Diego was right.
I’m leaning against the kitchen counter drinking water and watching my boyfriend’s arms flex every time he tightens a bolt. His hair is damp. His forearms are tan. The screwdriver is doing something to his jaw that I want to put my mouth on.
“You could help,” he says without looking up.
“I’m supervising.”
“You’re staring at me.”
“Both things can be true.”
He shakes his head, but the corner of his mouth pulls.
I take another drink of water and don’t stop watching.
I don’t have to stop. That’s the thing I’m still getting used to — I can look at him as long as I want and nobody is going to walk in and see something they shouldn’t.
No locked doors. No fake excuses. Just Aaron Kelly sweating on my floor in a t-shirt, building me furniture.
I could watch this all day.
The apartment is small. One bedroom, one bathroom, a kitchen that barely fits two people standing side by side, a living room with a window that looks out over the street.
The floors are old hardwood, scratched and uneven.
The walls are white and mostly bare. There’s a mattress in the bedroom still in its plastic wrapper because we haven’t gotten to it yet, and a stack of boxes against the wall that contains everything I own in this country.
It’s not much. It’s mine.
Not a dorm. Not the academy in Omsk. Not a room in someone else’s building where I stayed because a hockey club decided I was worth housing. My name is on the lease. My name — the one on my new, beautiful American passport, the one that says I belong here. Aleksandr Vorontsovsky, Apartment 4B.
“Okay.” Aaron sits back on his heels and holds up the instruction sheet. “This says step seven requires a Phillips head screwdriver. I’ve been using a flathead for steps one through six.”
“Is that a problem?”
“It means I have to redo steps one through six.”
“You’re the one who refused to let me hire someone.”
“You said you didn’t want movers. I said I’d help. Those are different statements.” He picks up the Phillips head from the floor next to him, weighs it in his hand, and starts unscrewing with a look on his face that’s so focused and serious you’d think he was performing surgery.
This is the man I love. Redoing six steps of a bookshelf because the screws are wrong and he won’t let it go.
“I’m getting food,” I say. “Thai or Chinese?”
“Thai. Extra peanut sauce.”
“I know what you want, Aaron Kelly.”
He looks up at me. Green eyes, flushed face, that half-smile that still makes my pulse do something inconvenient. “Yeah. I think you do.”
I grab my phone and the keys — my keys, to my apartment, which is a sentence I think at least four times a day — and call in the order on the way down the stairs. Four flights. My legs are going to be in excellent shape by the time training camp starts.
When I come back up with the food, Aaron has finished the bookshelf. It’s standing against the wall, slightly crooked, and he’s looking at it with his arms crossed and his head tilted looking at his handiwork critically.
“It leans,” I say.
“It does not lean.”
“Aaron Kelly. It leans.”
“The floor is uneven. The shelf is perfect.”
I set the food on the counter and stand next to him. We both look at the bookshelf. It absolutely leans. Maybe ten degrees. Enough that I can see it, which means he can see it too, which means he’ll be thinking about it at 3 AM.
“It’s good,” I tell him. “Thank you.”
He bumps his shoulder into mine. “You don’t own any books.”
“I’ll buy some.”
“You’re going to buy books to fill the bookshelf I just built you?”
“I’m settling in. I might as well decorate this place and fill it with all kinds of personal things and who knows, in between games I might actually pick up a book now that college is over.”
He laughs. I hand him his food and we eat standing up because the only place to sit is the floor or the mattress that’s still in plastic.
We lean against the counter, shoulders touching, passing the peanut sauce back and forth.
The window is open and the sounds of the street come up — traffic, someone’s music, a dog barking.
The light is going golden the way it does in New York in late afternoon, slanting through the window and making long rectangles on the hardwood.
My phone buzzes. I glance at it. Olga.
I put the phone face down on the counter and take another bite.
Aaron sees. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t need to. He just shifts his weight so his shoulder presses a little harder into mine, and we keep eating.
After dinner we go back to the boxes. Most of it is clothes and gear — my equipment bag takes up half the bedroom closet by itself.
A box of kitchen things that I bought last week because I’ve never owned a set of plates before.
A box of shoes. A smaller box, taped shut, that I packed myself in Hartley before I left.
I open it on the bedroom floor. On top is a framed photo.
Me and my father. I’m eight. He’s crouching next to me on an outdoor rink in Omsk, one arm around my shoulders, both of us in hockey gear.
My helmet is too big — it’s tilted sideways on my head and I’m grinning underneath it.
He’s looking at the camera with the same face I see in the mirror every morning.
Same jaw. Same eyes. His are crinkled at the corners because he’s laughing at something, or about to.
I haven’t looked at this photo in a long time. I kept it in my dorm room at Ashford, in a drawer, not on display. I wasn’t hiding it. I just didn’t need anyone asking questions about the man in the picture.
I take it to the living room.
Aaron is breaking down empty boxes, folding them flat, stacking them neatly by the door. Of course he is. He looks up when I walk in.
I hold the frame in both hands for a second. Then I cross to the wall next to the bookshelf — the crooked bookshelf, my bookshelf — and hold it up. Eye level. I don’t have a nail yet, so I just hold it there, seeing how it looks.
Aaron comes up behind me. He looks over my shoulder at the photo. I feel his breath near my ear, the warmth of him close.
“Wow,” he says. Quiet. “You look so much alike.”
“Everyone says that.”
“No, I mean—” He’s studying the photo. His hand comes up and rests on my hip, light, easy. “The eyes. The way he’s laughing. That’s you.”
My throat does something I wasn’t expecting. A tightening. Not painful — just sudden.
I keep holding the photo against the wall.
“He put me on skates when I was four,” I say. “There was a rink near our building. Outdoor, terrible ice, boards held together with wire. He took me every morning before work. Even when it was minus thirty.”
Aaron doesn’t say anything. His hand stays on my hip.
“He would have loved you,” I say.
It comes out before I can think about it. Direct. Certain. The way I say things I know are true.
Aaron’s hand tightens on my hip. He presses closer. His chin comes to rest on my shoulder, and for a moment we’re both looking at the photo — at my father’s face, at the eight-year-old kid in the crooked helmet who didn’t know what was coming.
“I wish I could have met him,” Aaron says.
I nod. My jaw is tight. My eyes are doing something I’m not going to acknowledge. I keep holding the photo where it is, at eye level, on the wall of my apartment in New York City, in the country where I am a citizen.
Aaron reaches past me and takes the frame. He sets it on the bookshelf — leaning it against the wall on the top shelf, angled so you can see it from anywhere in the room.
“Until we get a nail,” he says.
I look at it. My father, in my living room. Looking out at this life he never got to see.
“Until we get a nail,” I say.
Aaron’s hand finds the back of my neck. His fingers press into the tight muscle there, warm and firm, and I close my eyes.
Just for a second. Just long enough to feel it — all of it.
The apartment. The lease. The citizenship.
The career that starts in three weeks when I walk into the Titans facility and put on a jersey with my name on it.
The man standing behind me with his hand on my neck.
Ten years ago I was a thirteen-year-old sending stipend money to his mother in Omsk. Now I’m here.
I open my eyes. Turn around. Aaron is right there — close, green eyes soft, a smudge of dust on his cheek from breaking down boxes. I brush it off with my thumb.
“We still need to set up the bed,” I say.
“The mattress is still in plastic.”
“So unwrap it.”
“Sasha, it needs sheets. We don’t have sheets.”
“I have two hours before the store closes.” I step closer. “Or we don’t need sheets.”
His ears go red. There it is. A month and a half of dating out in the open and his ears still go red when I push. I will never get tired of that.
“You’re impossible,” he says.
“And yet.” I put my hands on his waist. His shirt is still damp with sweat and I don’t care even a little bit. “Here you are. In my apartment. Building me furniture.”
“A crooked bookshelf. One crooked bookshelf.”
“My hero.”
He kisses me. Or I kiss him. I’ve stopped keeping track of who starts it — we both just end up there, his mouth on mine, my hands pulling him closer, the summer heat making everything damp and sticky and I don’t care.
His fingers curl into my hair. I press him back against the counter and he makes a sound against my mouth — that small, caught sound he makes when I surprise him — and my blood goes hot.
“Bed,” I murmur against his lips.
“No sheets.”
“Floor.”
“Sasha.”
“Shower.”
He pulls back just far enough to look at me. His lips are red. His eyes are dark. His ears are still burning. “We haven’t set up the shower curtain either.”
“Then water will go everywhere. That sounds like a you problem, Aaron Kelly.”
He laughs. Drops his forehead against mine. His hands are on my chest, not pushing away — just resting there, feeling my heartbeat.
“I’m proud of you,” he says. “This place. Everything you did to get here. I’m proud of you.”
I don’t have a joke for that. I don’t have a comeback or a deflection or a charming line. I just have the fact of him, standing in my apartment, saying words no one in my family has said to me in ten years.
“Stay tonight,” I say.
“There’s no bed.”
“There’s a mattress. And me.”
“And no sheets.”
“Aaron Kelly. Stay.”
He looks at me. Then at the bookshelf, with my father’s photo angled on the top shelf, watching us. Then back at me.
“Yeah,” he says. “Okay.”
The light through the window has gone deep gold, almost orange, the sun dropping behind the buildings across the street. The apartment is hot and half-empty and the bookshelf leans and there are no sheets and no shower curtain and I’ve never been happier in my entire life.
Training camp starts in three weeks. The rest of it starts now.