Chapter 3 #2
Patrick’s mouth moved, not a smile, but the muscular start of one that he caught and killed before it arrived. “I’m not hiding. I’m standing in a visible location holding a drink.”
“That is textbook hiding. You picked the farthest point from the crowd and you’re facing the exit.” Asher took a step closer to test the waters. He didn’t think he’d missed the signals, but he knew better than to assume.
Patrick glanced toward the exit, then back. “That’s coincidence.”
“That’s strategy.” Asher grinned. “I respect it. I just also recognize it because I’m the one who’s usually doing it.”
“You don’t strike me as the type who hides at bars.”
“I don’t strike people as a lot of things I am.”
That landed. Asher could see it in the fractional pause, in the way Patrick’s gaze held a half-second longer than casual. It wasn’t flirtation, not yet, but curiosity.
“So what brings a hockey player to a charity gala in January?” Asher asked. “Team obligation?”
“Something like that.”
“That’s vague.”
Asher understood why Patrick’s guard was up. While it wasn’t career suicide to be out anymore, it still made life difficult, and from what he’d heard, hockey held on to the toxic masculinity like it was their duty to protect it.
“Yeah, well, you know how it is.” He took a sip of his drink and stared into the distance.
“I do.” He wanted to place a hand on Patrick’s shoulder and tell him to relax. Remind him he was safe here. No one would judge him for being himself. “But seriously, are you here voluntarily or did the team make you come?”
Patrick’s eyes narrowed. Not offended, sharpened. “No one makes me do anything. My agent thought it’d be good for me to make an appearance.”
“Fair,” Asher said, amused that he’d gotten a rise out of Patrick. And impressed that he wasn’t above using his celebrity to help kids.
“So you can see why it’s not an insult that I might not want to be brutally honest about my motivation for being here.”
“I didn’t take it as one. I took it as the first real thing either of us has said in this conversation.”
Patrick studied him. The assessment had changed, less clinical, more considered. Asher had done something unexpected, and Patrick was recalculating.
“The foundation does real work. I don’t mind supporting that. I mind the—” He gestured, a small movement that took in the room, the noise, the social machinery of a gala.
“All the pomp,” Asher said.
Patrick held his gaze for a beat. “Yeah.”
“Same. I mean, I’m not super familiar with this group, but my dads asked me to come, so I’m here.”
“Your dads? Like plural?”
Asher was used to that reaction. If he wasn’t in a safe environment, he referred to them as his parents, but he wanted to see how Patrick reacted. Curiosity was good.
“Yeah, Sean Tucker’s my dad and Mason Atley is my other dad, but I call him Pops.”
“Cool.”
They stood at the bar for a while after that.
The conversation drifted without direction, the gala, the foundation, the exhaustion of being a professional athlete in a room full of professional athletes all pretending they weren’t sizing each other up.
Patrick said little, but the silence had edges.
When he spoke, it was specific, observations sharper than they first sounded, humor so dry it took Asher a beat to catch it.
They talked about Chicago. Patrick had been with the Syndicate for three years. He mentioned the lake and the practice facility but gave up nothing about his personal life. He didn’t bring up the speech or Asher’s dad, and Asher liked him for it.
Someone brushed past them to order a drink, and Patrick shifted closer to make room. Close enough that when he turned his head, Asher could see the scar across his left cheekbone, thin and silver.
A woman from the foundation board appeared at Asher’s elbow and pulled him into a conversation about the auction. By the time he’d extracted himself, the spot at the bar was empty. Patrick had left his glass on the counter, napkin folded beside it, and was gone.
Asher stood there for a second, then laughed under his breath. The first person worth talking to all night, and he was the one who’d left without a word.
He found Pops near the stage with his dad, who’d emerged from whatever backstage decompression he’d needed after the speech.
His dad had his jacket off and his sleeves pushed up, the most undone Asher had ever seen him at a public event.
Pops had a hand on his dad’s arm, not performative, just contact built from decades of knowing where the other person needed to be touched.
“There he is.” Pops’s face opened up. “We were about to send a search party.”
“I was at the bar.”
“For forty minutes?”
Had it been that long? Asher ran the math and came up short. The conversation with Patrick had felt like ten, maybe fifteen minutes. Time that hadn’t tracked because he hadn’t been counting.
“I met someone,” Asher said, and regretted the phrasing before the sentence was finished. “I mean someone my age. A hockey player. Plays for the Syndicate.”
Pops’s eyebrow went up in a way Asher recognized as dangerous. “A hockey player.”
“Don’t.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You said it with your eyebrow.”
His dad, who had been listening with the half-attention of a man still metabolizing the adrenaline of three hundred people, looked between them. “What did I miss?”
“Nothing,” Asher said. “Great speech, Dad.”
The deflection worked. His dad accepted the compliment with his usual discomfort—a nod, a murmured thanks, a pivot to asking about the drive down from Appleton—and the conversation moved on. Pops caught Asher’s eye once over his dad’s shoulder. The look warned that they weren’t done talking.
Asher spent the rest of the night pretending he wasn’t trying to catch another glimpse of Patrick.
It figured that the one time he’d tracked him down, Pops pulled him into a heated discussion about whether the Milwaukee Mavericks or the Chicago Bulldogs were going to have a better record in the upcoming season.
At home, he never stood a chance of winning this debate since both Asher and his dad had played for Milwaukee, but tonight is was two-on-one in favor of Chicago.
Asher was only half tuned into the conversation as he silently pleaded for Patrick to not disappear on him again.
It didn’t work. By the time he could break free, Patrick was nowhere to be found.
The drive back to his parents’ house was quiet. Pops rode shotgun, scrolling through his phone. His dad sat in the back with his eyes closed, not sleeping, turned inward, filing and sorting everything before he’d talk about it. Asher drove and left the radio off.
He was thinking about the bar. About the fact that Patrick hadn’t laughed at his jokes, and how the almost-laugh had landed harder than the real thing would have.
Asher wished he’d exchanged numbers with Patrick. He was almost certain the attraction hadn’t been one-sided, and the night was still young. Then again, Patrick had a game tomorrow night, so he was probably a dedicated athlete and already home in bed.
He signaled the turn toward the interstate and felt the evening sitting in his chest, unresolved, like a pitch he’d called that hadn’t been thrown yet.
Pops spoke without looking up from his phone. “Fontaine.”
Asher glanced over. “What?”
“The Syndicate defenseman. Patrick Fontaine. I looked up the list of who was supposed to attend.” Pops held the phone screen toward him: team photo, stats, the thumbnail headshot Asher didn’t need to see because he’d spent forty minutes memorizing the original.
The information wasn’t the point. Pops had watched Asher walk back from the bar and known, in the same effortless way he knew everything, exactly what had happened.
“Good player. Tough. Doesn’t give many interviews. ”
“I didn’t ask you to look him up.”
“You didn’t have to.” Pops pocketed his phone and settled back in the seat. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell your father.”
From the back seat, his dad’s voice came without his eyes opening. “I can hear you.”
“We know,” Pops and Asher said together, and the car was quiet again.
Asher drove. The city moved past the windows in streaks of light and cold, and he let the conversation play once more: the flat voice, the dry humor, the moment Patrick had looked at him when the charm dropped and the real thing showed through, as though that were the version of Asher he’d been waiting to see.
He hadn’t expected to want to keep talking to a stranger. He didn’t know what to do with the fact that he did.