Chapter 4 #3
“What do you want to know?”
“How do you call a game? What are you reading when the batter steps in?”
So Asher talked. About pitch sequencing, about reading a hitter’s weight shift, about the split-second decision between a fastball and a slider when the count was full. He talked with his hands because he couldn’t help it, gesturing through the mechanics of a throw from his crouch to second base.
Patrick listened the way he did everything. Completely. His eyes tracked Asher’s hands when he gestured, his jaw working like he was processing each piece before filing it away. The man listened like every word cost something, and he didn’t intend to waste a single one.
“You love it,” Patrick said when Asher finally stopped talking.
“Yeah.” He looked down at his coffee. “I love it. Just not sure it loves me back yet.”
“It will.”
“You sound pretty certain about that.”
“You talked for ten minutes, and your hands didn’t stop moving. People don’t do that about things they’re uncertain about.”
Asher looked at his own hands. Wrapped around the mug. Still. He hadn’t noticed them moving and hadn’t noticed them stop.
“You were watching my hands,” Asher said.
Patrick’s eyes dropped to his coffee. The redirect was fast, controlled, and exactly a half-second too late. Asher had seen where they’d been. On his hands first. Then his mouth. Then somewhere south of that for a fraction of a second before Patrick caught himself.
The apartment got very still.
“I should probably drive back,” Asher said. He didn’t move.
“It’s early.”
“It’s three-thirty.”
“The highway’s better in daylight.”
“I’ve driven it before.”
“Not from here.”
Asher looked at him. Patrick was staring out the window, the gray light catching the scar on his cheekbone.
His hand rested on his knee, fingers loose around the empty mug.
Asher wanted to reach across the cushion and put his hand over Patrick’s.
Wanted to know if the stillness went all the way through or if something underneath was shaking.
He didn’t. But the wanting was new, and it sat in his chest like something he wasn’t ready to put down.
“Next time,” Asher said. The words landed heavier than two words had any right to.
Patrick walked him to the door. The entryway was narrow. Room for one, barely room for two, and they were standing in it with Asher’s jacket in his hand and not nearly enough space between them.
“Thanks for coming,” Patrick said.
“Thanks for the observation about my schedule.”
Patrick’s mouth moved. Farther than usual, closer to something real. Asher felt it land somewhere in his chest, the way every small concession from this guy hit harder than it should because nothing came easy.
“Drive safe,” Patrick said.
“I always drive safe.”
“You strike me as the type who drives like his ass is on fire and someone’s chasing him.”
“Same thing if you’re good at it.”
He stepped into the hallway. The door shut behind him. He stood there for three seconds with his hand on the back of his neck, staring at the elevator like it owed him an explanation.
He drove home with the windows cracked open just enough to keep him awake and the radio off. His hands gripped the wheel because his body needed something to hold on to.
Somewhere south of the state line, he started doing the thing he did when someone got their hooks in him, which was to lay out all the reasons it was a bad idea.
Patrick lived two states away and kept himself shut tighter than anyone Asher had ever met.
He played a sport that swapped men like trading cards, and he could be in Calgary by the deadline with nothing either of them could do about it.
And Asher had a spring training to get to and a career that still hadn’t decided whether it wanted him.
None of those were the real reason, though, and he knew it because the real reason never changed.
Asher Tucker was very good at the first part.
The charm, the chase, the easy two-in-the-morning back-and-forth.
It was the second part he couldn’t do, the part where somebody stuck around long enough to leave.
He’d always handled that the way Pops had handed it to him without ever meaning to, by being the one who walked first. Walk before it counts, and it never gets the chance to gut you.
The problem was that this already counted.
He’d driven three hours to watch a man he’d met one time teach ten-year-olds to skate, and it had counted before he was out of the parking lot.
So the smart move, the safe one, the one every version of him from the last ten years was making on that dark stretch of interstate, was to let it cool.
Answer slower. Let spring training and a thousand miles do the quiet work of ending it. Leave first, the way he always did.
His phone buzzed at a red light in Kenosha.
You left your coffee mug dirty in the sink.
Asher grinned at the windshield and typed back one-handed.
That’s because I’m coming back for it.
Under a minute later:
Good to know.