Chapter 8
WALL
SEVEN FIFTY-FOUR, and Patrick is already waiting in a small square on my laptop, which is irritating for several reasons.
First, I intended to be early.
Second, he has arranged himself on a stool at his kitchen island with a mug by one elbow and an entire stack of printed pages by the other, every section flagged with a different color tab.
My own notes sit in two neat piles beside the laptop, and they were sufficient right up until his appeared on-screen.
Third, the dark green henley.
It fits across his shoulders without pulling and leaves two buttons open at his throat, sleeves shoved to mid-forearm. I know those forearms. At some point in the last three weeks my brain promoted them from a detail to a recurring problem, and nobody consulted me.
Patrick glances at the corner of his screen. "Six minutes early."
"So are you."
"I sent the invitation."
As though this gives him jurisdiction over time.
I accept the shared screen and give the vendor spreadsheet the left two-thirds of the display, which leaves Patrick contained in the remaining third. The point of the call is now very large, and the man who arranged it has been reduced to a manageable rectangle.
Professional conditions have been achieved.
"Your linen quote is wrong," he says.
It has been eighteen fucking seconds.
"The quote is from the vendor," I say through my teeth.
"The quantity is wrong."
Unhurried, because hurrying would suggest doubt, I click into the cell. "The quantity is based on the floor plan Mama Paws approved."
"The floor plan changed Tuesday." Without looking away from me, he picks up one of his color-coded pages. "At three fourteen."
"And changed back at four-oh-two."
Rather than argue, I open the email and share that it changed back at four-oh-two. Forty-eight minutes of preparation pays for itself in one dark eyebrow lifting on a screen in Milwaukee.
"Fine," he says.
"I accept your apology."
"You received an acknowledgment."
"It was very moving."
The corner of his mouth tries something and gets put away before it qualifies as a smile.
Then he turns the linen cell green, and for the next ten minutes the call is exactly what he promised.
Logistics. We eliminate a caterer, reject a rental company that prices folding chairs like heirlooms, and go to war over printed programs, a war I lose on superior evidence: I argue that QR codes are free, and Patrick reports that Mama Paws printed an email last week and mailed it to him.
We settle on half the original print run, and he logs my surrender in its own cell.
The ease of it gets under my guard. He finds the holes in my plans before they turn expensive, I catch the spots where his contingencies have started breeding, and neither of us ever has to explain why a backup matters. We only fight over whose backup gets to live.
On-screen, Patrick switches to the florist proposals. His hand drifts off camera, ceramic scrapes over stone, and his next breath snags halfway in.
The picture blurs at the same time. Bad connection.
"The shelter wants local flowers," he says, voice half an octave lower for some reason. "This quote includes imported roses."
"Cut them."
"The florist?"
I roll my eyes. "No, the roses."
His mouth presses flat, and even through the pixels I catch the almost-smile underneath. I sit back with the quiet satisfaction of a clean glove save.
The second florist donates labor but prices vases as though each one comes with mineral rights, so I open their itemized proposal and start stripping it for parts. Patrick listens with his chin braced on one fist, gaze aimed at the shared document.
Except when it slips.
Half a second, maybe less. His eyes drop below the laptop and return while I'm still explaining why twelve dollars for decorative moss is ten dollars too much.
Second monitor, maybe. Or his phone. Knowing him, both, arranged beneath the camera in some approved formation.
I drag the vase line into the rejection column. "Agreed?"
Another downward flick. "Yes."
The call rolls on, and somewhere past the fifteen-minute mark my shoulders loosen without permission.
So does my mouth. When Patrick edits my delivery window, I change it back while he watches me do it.
When he highlights a transport cost that appears twice, he looks entirely too pleased with my silence.
"You put it there," I say.
"You approved it."
"I trusted your numbers."
"Well, that was reckless, wasn’t it?"
His chest moves on a shallow inhale.
Then nothing.
For one long beat Patrick holds perfectly still, and only his eyes move, cutting down toward the counter. When they come back to the camera, the blue in them has gone darker. Compression artifacts, probably. Wisconsin's infrastructure is famously unreliable.
He clears his throat and switches us to the revised vendor list, and I watch the muscle in his forearm flex beside the mug.
Tired. There's my diagnosis. Between games, travel, the launch at Frank's, and practice, we're both running on fumes. Patrick simply hides it better. He’d probably look composed during emergency surgery performed on his own body.
For the next few minutes the diagnosis holds.
Kind of. Provided I handle the evidence very badly.
His focus stays sharp and his answers stay exact, but every so often a pause opens where no pause belongs.
A breath arrives through his nose too measured to be casual.
His shoulders draw back, hold, then ease forward like he's talked them down.
My brain starts working overtime, scrambling for answers.
Hungover, possibly. Except Patrick isn’t exactly known for excess drinking.
His phone, then. Theo, texting him something he can't afford to open on a professional call.
That thought is a mistake. It arrives with a full picture attached: a lean body braced against a desk, shirt dragged up over a clenching stomach, eyes finding mine across a lamplit office while Patrick's mouth—
I click the wrong cell and delete the florist's address.
"Careful, Wallace."
One keyboard command restores it. "I know what I’m doing."
"Sure you do."
Gravel catches on the last word and stays there. He reaches for his mug, but his fingers stop against the handle without closing around it. Across his chest, the henley pulls tight, his body settling against some movement the island keeps out of frame.
My cursor sits motionless over a row of centerpiece options. On the screen, Patrick waits.
"Option two," I say.
"The glass cylinders." His gaze dips. Half a second passes before it comes back up. "Approved."
More gravel now, dragged the whole length of the word, and every hair on my forearms lifts.
Then his jaw tightens.
There. The muscle under his beard, jumping once near the hinge.
I know that muscle. Across two hundred feet of ice, it appears when he takes a bad penalty.
Off ice, made a cameo at Frank's while a photographer ordered us closer together.
In the shelter, it appeared while we both held the same puck and waited for the other to lie first.
That muscle doesn't mean tired.
It means Patrick Grze?kowiak is at the edge of his control and refusing to show it. And there is exactly one person in his life with a documented history of putting him there in enclosed spaces.
I’m doing some fucked up math now. The hitch in his breath. The eyes going down, and down, and down. The voice roughening one word at a time. Fingers that can’t operate a mug. A henley pulled tight against a rhythm I can't see.
The calculation arrives, and knocks the wind out of me—there’s a Theo under that island.
My pulse jumps from resting to third-period in the span of two seconds, heat flooding up my neck and down past my waistband with no layover in between. My whole body goes rigid, prepared to fight. Or flee.
This is a charity call. There is a spreadsheet with forty active cells between us. I combed my hair for this meeting.
For three full seconds I run the data again, ears roaring, because a read this catastrophic deserves review. Breath. Eyes. Gravel. Mug. Jaw. The color-tabbed pages he hasn't touched in minutes.
The read stands.
This entire time… We discussed linens.
Eighteen minutes. It took me eighteen minutes. In my defense, the moss was genuinely overpriced.
In my screen, Patrick has gone still again, and this stillness has nothing to do with whatever's happening under his counter.
He's watching me arrive. No surprise anywhere on his face.
No scramble. He only lifts his eyes fully to the camera, to me, and holds, the entire screen sharpening around them.
He knows I know.
Worse. He's been waiting for me to get there.
Somewhere in Milwaukee there exists a version of tonight where this man tabbed his pages, chose that henley, let Theo fold himself under the counter, and then sat through vendor mathematics timing how long the league's best-tracker would take to notice.
The thought lands with its own dedicated heat.
Then, under the edge of the call, faint enough to pass for fabric: a wet slide.
Every thought in my head focuses on evacuation.
The sound stops when Patrick glances down. Whatever passes between them takes one heartbeat, and when it resumes, it's slower. Deliberately louder.
Because Theo knows too. There are two of them and one of me, and this was never, not for one line item, a meeting about linens.
My cock surges against my sweatpants hard enough to ache. I grab the table edge with both hands, as though the furniture is the thing that needs restraining.
Patrick's eyes move over my face, unhurried. A read. He takes in the breath I can't get all the way down and whatever my jaw is doing, and then he leaves the next move with me.
The red button waits at the bottom of my screen. One click, and tomorrow we blame the connection, and the useful fiction survives that the most indecent thing on this call was decorative moss.