Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Patrick Fontaine burrowed into Asher’s brain like the cheesy eighties pop tunes his pops played at full volume in the car.
He tried thinking about anything other than the man’s sculpted ass and his eyes that screamed fuck me without even trying.
He really did. But by the middle of the following week, he caved. Hard.
Finding his social media profiles wasn’t hard.
There were a handful of game-day posts, a repost from the Syndicate’s community outreach, nothing personal.
No vacation photos, no food, no dogs. The profile picture was a headshot in team gear, jaw set, the scar across his cheekbone just visible.
The account existed because someone in the Syndicate’s media department had told him it should, and Patrick had complied without enthusiasm.
Asher scrolled through it twice. Then he clicked the button to send a DM, hoping like hell he wasn’t about to make an ass of himself. With any luck, Patrick didn’t have someone running the account for him.
He typed, deleted, and typed again.
For the record, the exit was to your LEFT. You were facing the coat check. Figured a defenseman would have better spatial awareness.
The message was stupid, but until he knew who he was talking to, he wasn’t about to open the door to a hookup.
He sent it before he could revise it a third time and dropped his phone on his chest. With that done, he flopped back on his mattress and tried to keep from obsessively checking his phone to see if the message had been read.
It hadn’t because it was two in the morning, and Patrick was either sleeping or on a plane to his next game.
Or he doesn’t check his DMs because they’re flooded with fans who think they have a shot with him.
Asher ignored the voice in the back of his head telling him he wasn’t much better than those fans.
He was the one who’d slid into Patrick’s DMs, hoping it would lead to finding a time when Asher could drive down to Chicago to burn off a bit of pent-up sexual frustration.
Sure, he could go north to Green Bay or south to Milwaukee for the same thing, but random dudes weren’t the same as this guy he’d met one freaking time.
Asher put the phone down, picked it up, put it down again.
He fell asleep with it on his chest and woke to it vibrating next to him.
One message.
Patrick
The exit was to my right. I checked.
Asher sat with his back against the headboard, blanket pooled around his waist, and read it three times. No emoji, no LOL, no punctuation beyond the period. It was a stupid conversation, but Asher had drawn a blank on how to open that line of communication safely.
He was grinning. He could feel it, wide and stupid and impossible to stop.
You checked? Then why did you walk around like you were lost at the end of the night?
Maybe I was distracted. Happens to the best of us. Were you seriously stalking me?
Found something more interesting than listening to my parents schmooze old rich people. Sue me.
Damn. Thought maybe you were interested in me, but it turns out you were just zoning out and trying to stay awake. I see how it is.
What are you even doing up this early?
Flying out to Vancouver. What’s your excuse?
Some asshole DM’d me at ass-o’clock.
I’m sorry, princess. Did I interrupt your beauty sleep? And who has notifications on for their DMs, anyway?
Not all of us are hotshot hockey players. You’d be surprised at how few messages I get.
You’re right. You might not be in the big leagues yet, but I thought you’d have plenty of admirers.
Does it make me tragically uncool now that you know that’s not the case?
Nah, makes me a leader instead of a follower.
The texts didn’t stop.
Asher couldn’t have said when it crossed from joking into a habit.
He sent Patrick a photo of the Fireflies’ pitching machine with the caption: She pulls left and makes a noise like a dying animal, but she’s mine.
Patrick responded with a photo of the Syndicate’s parking garage in gray morning light: This is the most interesting part of my day.
Asher wrote back: That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever read, and Patrick replied: I meant the part where you messaged me.
Asher read it four times looking for irony and couldn’t find any.
By the end of the week, Asher wasn’t counting the gap between messages anymore because there wasn’t one worth counting other than when Patrick was busy doing hockey things.
He texted the way he spoke, with a dryness that made the occasional joke land harder because it arrived without warning.
Asher sent a highlight clip of a play he’d made last season after receiving one from the previous night’s hockey game.
Patrick
You dropped your elbow on the throw. It’s costing you velocity.
Are you scouting me right now?
You sent me the video.
He texted Patrick from the batting cage, from the weight room, from the drive-through where he got coffee every morning.
He texted from his couch in the dark. Asher seriously needed to get himself back on a decent schedule before heading out to spring training, but he was having more fun bantering back and forth than he’d had in a long time.
Patrick asked how Asher decided between a fastball and a slider when the count was full.
Asher’s response was quick. When he asked Patrick what it felt like to read a two-on-one, Patrick wrote three paragraphs.
Asher saved the screenshot because it was cute to see how long-winded Patrick got when he was talking about hockey.
You responded with a freaking essay.
You asked a good question.
I ask a lot of good questions.
You do. You’re like a toddler.
He was learning Patrick’s rhythms. The long afternoon silence meant it was naptime before the game. The messages came in a burst after ten p.m., when Patrick was home and whatever wall he kept up during the day came down brick by brick in the dark. Patrick never used exclamation points or emoji.
Soon, he’d get into his own rhythm. He needed to head down to his parents’ place to get warmed up.
The benefit of having both a former pitcher and catcher as parents was that they understood what it was like.
Neither had taken on the responsibility of coaching him when he was younger, but they were always there for critique whenever he asked.
Spring training was three weeks out. Somewhere in Milwaukee, Navarro was rehabbing a wrist that had been questionable since September, and Asher was next on the depth chart. He mentioned none of this to Patrick. It was too early for the parts of his life that mattered most.
Despite the fact that Asher would rather text than talk on the phone, he hated messaging back and forth with Patrick.
He liked this guy, which was strange since he hadn’t known who he was before the gala and their entire weird friendship had been built on messages sent whenever they had time.
At least they’d reached the point where they exchanged phone numbers rather than messaging through social media.
For some stupid reason, hitting the call button felt like a progression in whatever they were doing, and he wasn’t sure Patrick wanted that. For all Asher knew, he was someone Patrick could vent to after a rough day and nothing more.
You’ll never know if you don’t suck it up and do it.
He’d been typing a response to Patrick’s game recap and the text kept growing. Patrick had taken a gnarly hit in the game that night, and Asher wasn’t sure he was as fine as he kept insisting. He hit the call button before he could talk himself out of it.
Patrick picked up on the third ring. “Did you just butt-dial me or are you calling on purpose?”
Asher heard him suck in a sharp breath. “Your definition of fine needs work. Where did the shot hit you?”
“Square in the chest. Luckily, we wear protection,” Patrick explained. “Like I said, I’ll be fine. Just tender. I’ve had much worse.”
“Why do you say that like it’s a flex?”
“Because it’s all part of the game. Would you get all mother-hen if one of your teammates got hurt?” Patrick sounded annoyed. “Would you be on the phone making sure they weren’t hurt worse than they told you?”
Asher had to laugh at that. Patrick obviously didn’t know the lore, didn’t know what led up to his parents coming out to the world and Pops retiring from baseball. Then again, Asher wasn’t the one who’d injured Patrick, so it wasn’t at all the same.
“Fine. Point taken,” Asher conceded. “Maybe I just wanted to talk to you. Is that okay?”
Patrick sighed. “Yeah, that’s fine. It’s actually good to hear your voice. I was starting to tell myself you weren’t actually you.”
“Oh? Then who was I?” Asher chuckled. He felt better knowing he wasn’t the only one who hadn’t been satisfied with where things were.
“Some weirdo who saw a picture of the two of us chatting at that gala and decided to pretend they were you,” he admitted.
“That’d be a lot of work to go through just to talk to you. And what if you’d walked away thinking I was a complete asshole? That’s a lot of risk for very little reward.”
“Hey now, I’m a fucking catch,” Patrick scoffed. “And who says I don’t think you’re an asshole?”
“I’m charming as fuck, and you know it.”
“And so damned humble.”
They talked for over an hour. Somewhere around the forty-minute mark, Patrick started telling him about a road trip where the charter bus driver took a wrong turn heading to the arena in Indianapolis and the backup goalie, who was from Indy, spent twenty minutes trying to convince him to use Google Maps.
“The driver wouldn’t do it?” Asher asked.
“He said he’d been driving buses for thirty years and didn’t need a phone to tell him where to go.”
“Did he find it?”
“Eventually. Pruitt started doing play-by-play from the back row. ‘And Driver Mike takes another left. Bold strategy. The arena remains elusive.’”