The music could be heard from the lobby before the elevator reached the ground floor, playing at that specific volume unique to celebrations three hours deep—celebrations that had crossed the threshold where no one was giving a thought to whether the noise bothered other hotel guests. When the elevator doors slid open, Aaron spotted the majority of the Kentucky roster spread across the lobby and the adjacent lounge, the national championship trophy passing from hand to hand among those still standing, while water and Gatorade bottles were favored by those who had chosen to hydrate instead.
Julius commanded the center of the space with the specific energy of someone in a moment of full celebration—the kind of presence that filled any room regardless of its dimensions. Andrew and Aaron Harrison were seated together on a lobby sofa, still wearing their game jerseys, phones in hand, sending and receiving messages at the speed of two people who had been at it for hours and had zero intention of slowing down. James Young was conversing with two assistant coaches near the bar counter, speaking in the tone of someone recounting a story to those who hadn't been there to witness it firsthand. Calipari was absent from the lobby, which was precisely what Aaron had anticipated; Calipari never lingered in the lobby during post-game celebrations, and Aaron couldn't imagine tonight being any different.
Aaron moved through the lobby without pausing longer than necessary. Julius intercepted him halfway across with an extended arm, and Aaron bumped fists with him without breaking stride—a gesture Julius correctly interpreted as a quiet goodnight rather than a snub. They had shared a locker room, the floor, and film sessions long enough for both to read those subtle cues without needing to utter a word.
The elevator took longer than usual because someone on the seventh floor had held the door open. Aaron stood waiting in front of the closed doors holding the Tournament Most Outstanding Player trophy in his right hand, the weight of the crystal far more noticeable now that his adrenaline had settled to a level where his body began registering everything it had spent hours ignoring. He glanced down at the award for a second. It was a handsome object in the sense that objects representing something grand are handsome—not merely for what they are, but for what they signify: an entire collegiate season of forty victories without a single defeat.
When he reached his room, a thin band of yellow light was visible beneath the door, a seam that shouldn't have been present had the room been empty.
Aaron frowned for the second it took him to recall that he had handed out a spare key card earlier that afternoon before both teams departed for the stadium—a moment that felt as though it had occurred on another day entirely, though less than eight hours had actually elapsed. Tucking the trophy under his arm, he pulled his key card from his pants pocket and unlocked the door.
The first thing he registered was the sound of soft music drifting from the portable speaker Zoe had synced to her phone at some point over the past few hours. The second thing he saw was Zoe herself.
She was standing in the center of the room, having changed out of the oversized Kentucky jersey she had borrowed from Aaron earlier. As Aaron stepped inside and kicked the door shut behind him with his heel, Zoe looked at him with the specific smile she wore whenever she possessed knowledge the other person had yet to uncover.
And then she began to move to the music.
A slow R&B track was playing, filled with lyrics about bodies meeting in the dark, and she proceeded to remove her clothes piece by piece with a deliberate slowness that left Aaron frozen by the doorway, his eyes locked on the display before him, momentarily forgetting to breathe. When she was finally finished, standing completely bare before him as the room's dim light outlined her silhouette, Aaron crossed the room in three strides and took her into his arms with an urgency that permitted no more foreplay than was strictly necessary.
That was the last detail he recalled with complete clarity from those opening minutes.
Much later, after the music had faded into silence and the room's sole light source was the small nightstand lamp sitting beside his MOP trophy, Zoe was resting beside him with her head against Aaron's shoulder, their hands intertwined over the duvet. The quiet in the room carried the specific stillness found only in hotel rooms late at night, when everything that was meant to happen had transpired and all that remained was time that required no filling.
"Did you like the surprise?" Zoe asked without shifting position.
Aaron reflected on what had greeted him when he opened the door. The music. The low light. Zoe standing in the center of the room, initiating her movement before he had even fully stepped inside.
"Yes," Aaron said.
Zoe smiled. Aaron felt it before he saw it, her cheek resting directly against his shoulder. She pressed a soft kiss against his chest without offering another word—her subtle way of closing certain conversations, not from a lack of things to say, but because some moments required no additional words beyond those already spoken.
The silence that followed was comfortable, the kind that exists between two people who feel no pressure to fill the void and know how to distinguish that ease from a silence that demands talk.
It was Aaron who eventually broke it.
"What comes next?" Aaron asked softly.
He didn't need to elaborate. Both understood what he meant. The draft was scheduled for June, leaving under three months for everything that occurs between the end of the collegiate season and the moment an NBA commissioner reads a name aloud from a podium in a New York venue. The process of declaring eligibility, agent meetings, interviews with scouts and front-office executives who harbored interest, private workouts where franchise staff measured every conceivable metric in controlled environments, and ultimately the draft itself—along with whichever city was tied to the franchise that selected him. All of it lay directly ahead. And all of it meant departing Kentucky, Lexington, the corridors of the Joe Craft Center, the stands of Rupp Arena, and the people he had grown close to over the past few months.
It also meant stepping away from whatever had developed between himself and Zoe—a bond neither had chosen to label from the start.
"I don't know," Zoe said. She paused, not out of hesitation, but with the care of someone choosing her words thoughtfully. "But I don't think we have to figure it out tonight either."
Aaron remained silent.
"Let it flow," Zoe said softly. "Tonight you won the national championship. Tomorrow there's a flight home. The day after tomorrow will yield plenty of time to figure out what comes next. But tonight, you don't have to think about any of that."
Aaron stared up at the room's ceiling for a moment. The MOP trophy rested on the nightstand, its crystal catching the lamp's glow and reflecting a faint arc of light onto the adjacent wall. It was the kind of object that, within a few months, would sit on a shelf in a location Aaron had yet to visit, in a city he couldn't yet name—yet in this present moment, it sat on a nightstand in Arlington, Texas, beside a lamp and Zoe's phone with its speaker connected, the music stopped, and the conversation regarding the future lingering softly in the air.
"You're right," Aaron said.
Zoe lifted her head from Aaron's shoulder and looked down at him. She leaned in and kissed him. And the night continued as it did, with neither of them speaking again of what lay beyond the summer until the following day.
The morning flight from Arlington back to Lexington departed at ten o'clock on Tuesday morning with the entire Kentucky roster aboard, the national championship trophy stowed securely in the front-row overhead bin, fastened with a seatbelt extension a team manager had modified for the occasion. Aaron occupied his usual window seat on the right side of the aircraft, the exact position he preferred on team flights because the takeoff views were superior from that side.
Julius was seated beside him, his legs stretched out toward the aisle because standard airplane seating was never designed to accommodate an athlete of his proportions—a reality shared by most of the roster on board.
"How are you feeling?" Julius asked once the aircraft reached cruising altitude and the seatbelt sign was turned off.
"Good," Aaron said.
"For real?"
"For real."
Julius nodded. It was the identical exchange they had shared during warmups prior to the final—the same questions, the same answers, the same nod—except this time Julius wasn't checking to see if Aaron was ready to play, but verifying how Aaron was processing things after the battle was won, a distinctly different question despite using the exact same words.
The flight lasted two hours and forty minutes. Aaron spent the majority of the time gazing out the window or sleeping—the two activities he defaulted to on flights when his body was still processing the preceding thirty-seven hours and needed a restful way to manage it. Julius slept as well, his head tilted toward the aisle, mouth slightly open, his standard posture on every team flight throughout the year.
When the plane initiated its descent toward Lexington, Aaron woke up and looked down through the window at the city that had served as his home for the last eight months of his life. From above, it looked different than it did from street level—smaller in a way, easier to take in as a whole. Aaron observed the buildings, roads, and parks without seeking to identify any specific landmark, simply absorbing the view in its entirety.
What greeted them when the team bus pulled out of the airport and turned down the main avenue toward downtown Lexington was something Aaron hadn't fully anticipated during the flight, though in hindsight it made absolute sense.
The streets of Lexington were packed with people.
It wasn't a crowd that had gathered spontaneously, but a massive reception organized in advance by the city council and the university—complete with crowd control barriers along the sidewalks, security personnel stationed at intersections, and large LED screens installed at the major gathering points. Blue was everywhere. Flags, jerseys, caps, and banners bearing the players' names—some hand-painted, others printed at home. The noise filtered into the bus through the sealed glass, muffled yet unmistakable.
Aaron sat on the right side of the bus with his window at eye level, taking in the scene outside with the focused expression of someone attempting to engrave an image into memory, knowing it was the kind of moment that never repeats itself in quite the same way.
There were no words adequate for what he was witnessing, or perhaps words existed but none Aaron possessed in that moment felt grand enough to capture the full weight of what he was experiencing as the bus crept through the streets of Lexington among thousands of fans who had turned out to welcome them home.
Julius had his arm hanging out the opposite window, waving to the fans gathered closest to the barricades. The Harrison twins had found an opening through the bus's sunroof, standing waist-high out the top to respond to the signs and cheers. James Young was filming with his phone, arm extended toward the window.
Aaron didn't record a single second of the journey.
Not because he lacked the desire to preserve the memory, but because he believed certain moments could only be truly captured by experiencing them directly without a screen in between, and this was undeniably one of those moments. He kept his eyes on the window as the bus moved forward, etching into his mind what no device could capture: the sea of blue jerseys, the muffled roar filtering through the glass, the faces of fans pointing in excitement as they recognized him from the sidewalk.
It was Tuesday, April 8, 2014.
It was the day after capturing the college national championship with an unblemished forty-game winning streak—an achievement unmatched in modern college basketball history by any standard Aaron had uncovered in the records he had researched since his reincarnation into this body.
And as Aaron gazed out the window of the team bus in Lexington, Kentucky, with an entire city celebrating around them and the championship trophy resting in the overhead compartment above, he found himself unable to put into words the exact measure of what he was feeling.
Which was, in itself, a completely valid way to feel it.
Authors thought
What did you think of today's chapter? Give me your opinions and thoughts.
For football fans, check out my other fanfic, *The Golden Standard*, and discover the story of Wyatt Sterling.
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