Chapter 5 #2
“I’m not hovering. I’m making sure you don’t put the ice on wrong and make it worse.” Asher dropped beside him on the couch, close enough that Patrick caught hotel soap and something warmer underneath it. “How bad is it actually?”
“Bruised, and I’ve had worse.” Patrick scooted back, letting the couch support him. “Medical said nothing’s broken if that makes you feel any better.”
“That’s what you said on the phone last time, and you were lying then too.
” Asher sat at the opposite end of the couch, turned toward Patrick with his leg bent on the cushion in front of him.
“But yes, it does make me feel better knowing you’re not going out there playing with a broken rib.
I’ve heard you hockey players play through some wild shit. ”
“I wasn’t lying. I just have a high pain threshold.” He ignored the bit about the types of injuries they played through. A few years back, one guy played with a broken sternum. Knowing how he felt right now, Patrick wasn’t sure how in the hell he’d managed that. Probably doped out of his gourd.
“That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.” Asher leaned back and watched Patrick’s face with an expression that wasn’t pity or concern but something closer to patience. “You can just say it hurts.”
Patrick adjusted the ice against his side. “Fine. It hurts. Happy now?”
“See? That wasn’t hard.”
“Piss off.”
Asher’s mouth pulled sideways, half-grin and half-concern, and Patrick felt the tension in his shoulders drop by a degree.
He wasn’t performing for Asher, wasn’t doing the stoic reassurance that kept people from worrying.
He wasn’t sure when he’d stopped doing it, but the impulse had gone quiet somewhere between the text exchange in the locker room and the knock on the door.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?” Patrick asked.
“Because you would have gotten in your own head about it.” Asher said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
“You’d have spent the whole game thinking about me in the stands instead of doing your job, and then you would have been distracted when that hit came, and it would have been worse. ”
“Mighty high on yourself, aren’t you?” Patrick teased, even though he wasn’t wrong about any of it.
Patrick would have been hyperaware, scanning for him during warm-ups, wondering what Asher saw when he watched him play.
The thought sat uncomfortably close to the truth of what had just happened in his locker room, the way he’d stared at that text for ten full seconds before his brain engaged.
“Fair point. Besides,” Asher said, “I wanted to see you in your actual life. Not the version you show people on FaceTime at eleven p.m., when you’re half-asleep and the lighting makes you look like a vampire.”
Patrick looked at him and saw someone who really wanted to get to know him. No jokes landing in rapid succession, no charm offensive filling every corner of the room. Asher looked tired and focused and present in a way that made the hotel room feel smaller than it was.
“Did you eat after the game?” Asher asked.
“Protein bar in the locker room.”
“That’s not eating, Patrick.” Asher was already reaching for his phone on the nightstand. “I’ll order something from room service. What do you want?”
“It’s midnight.”
“Kitchen closes at one, so we have time. What do you want?”
Patrick let himself be taken care of, which wasn’t a skill he’d ever developed or even understood the mechanics of.
Asher did it without making it feel like charity or concern, just ordered a club sandwich and a bowl of soup without asking Patrick to choose.
When it arrived twenty minutes later, Asher ate half the sandwich while Patrick managed the soup one-handed with the ice still pressed against his side.
Asher had been watching something before Patrick arrived, some action movie that was forty minutes in and not worth trying to follow from the beginning.
Patrick didn’t care. The sound filled the space between them in a way that didn’t require conversation, and his body was starting to come down from the postgame adrenaline in a crash that hit harder than usual because his ribs had been screaming through the last six minutes of the third.
At some point, the distance between them on the couch got smaller. Patrick wasn’t sure if he was moving or if they both were, but he wished like hell he could pull Asher against his side. Fuck, when did he get so lonely he’d settle for cuddling on the couch during a movie?
“You moved well out there,” Asher said, his eyes on the screen but his voice pitched low enough that Patrick had to lean closer to hear it. “Before the hit, I mean. You’re faster than you look on a screen.”
“I’m also bigger than I look on TV.”
“Believe me, I noticed that when you walked in.” Asher’s shoulder was touching Patrick’s, a constant warm line of contact that neither of them had acknowledged or adjusted away from.
Patrick draped his right arm over the top of the couch, inviting Asher to lean against him.
Asher accepted the invitation with a shy smile.
He hummed as he made himself comfortable.
“That play in the second period where you stepped up and forced the turnover at the blue line… You made it look effortless.”
“It’s not effortless.”
“I know it’s not, and that’s exactly why it’s impressive when you make it look that way.”
Patrick’s ice was melting, the water seeping through the towel and pooling cold against his skin. He should rewrap it with fresh ice from the bucket, but moving would mean breaking the contact, and he was unwilling to lose it over something as minor as a wet towel.
Asher took the bundle from him without asking, got off the couch to refill it with fresh ice from the bucket, and came back to Patrick’s left side.
When he pressed the new wrap against Patrick’s ribs, his hand stayed, holding it steady against the bruise with his palm flat and his fingers curled around Patrick’s side.
“You can sleep if you want to,” Asher said. “You look like you’re about thirty seconds from passing out.”
“I’m not tired.” He was lying, and they both knew it.
“You’re such a liar.” Asher’s voice had dropped to something quieter, almost fond. “Just close your eyes.”
Patrick was exhausted the way that only happened after a physical game, where the adrenaline wore off all at once and left behind nothing but the damage and the weight of his own body.
The warm room, the background noise from the TV, and Asher’s hand steady against his side were pulling him toward something his body had already decided to stop fighting.
“I have to be at the rink by nine tomorrow morning,” Patrick said, already drifting off. “I should probably head home soon.”
“Just rest for a bit.” Asher’s thumb shifted against the towel, a small movement that Patrick wasn’t sure was conscious. “We’ll see how you’re feeling in about an hour. Do you have a change of clothes in your car?”
“Yeah, but that’s all the way downstairs,” Patrick mumbled.
“We can deal with that later.” Patrick wasn’t sure if he was dreaming or if Asher actually kissed the side of his head.
He hoped it was the latter. God, he’d have to make it up to him once he felt better.
“You can run down in the morning, and then we’ll get ready for breakfast. What time do you want to be up? ”
“Seven-thirty works. There’s a place I like about two blocks from the rink that opens early. We could go get breakfast.”
“I’ll set an alarm.”
Patrick registered what that meant, the full shape of what they were agreeing to without saying it directly. He was staying, and he was going to fall asleep in this hotel room with Asher’s hand on his ribs, a bad movie playing, and no pretense between them about what any of this was.
“Okay,” Patrick said.
Asher reached over with his free hand and turned the TV volume down until it was barely audible, then shifted both of them so Patrick was the one stretched out against Asher. His breathing was already evening out, slow and steady.
The last thing he registered before sleep pulled him under was Asher’s hand going slack against the towel, his grip loosening as consciousness left him, and the warmth of his palm staying exactly where it was.