Chapter 6 #2
They talked until Asher’s phone dropped to eight percent and Patrick’s voice had gone low and slow with exhaustion.
The conversation moved the way their texts did, but with Patrick’s face on the screen, Asher could see when he stopped choosing his words carefully—the shift in his eyes, the way his shoulders dropped half an inch.
“I should let you sleep,” Asher said.
“Probably.” Neither of them hung up. The silence sat between them, comfortable in a way that would have felt strange a week ago.
“Tomorrow,” Patrick said. “If you want.”
“Same time?”
“Earlier if you can. I have a morning skate tomorrow.” Patrick’s eyes were half-closed on the screen, fighting sleep and losing. “Text me when you get back to the house.”
“Yeah. I will.”
Patrick’s mouth did the thing it did, the almost-smile that landed harder than anyone else’s real one. “Goodnight, Asher.”
“Night, Patrick.”
The screen went dark, and Asher sat in the living room of his parents’ house with the phone in his hand and the desert silence pressing against the windows.
Pops called on a Sunday afternoon while Asher was stretched out on a lounger by the pool. He’d uncovered the pool his second day after Sean texted him the chemical instructions, which Asher had followed closely enough. The water was cold but swimmable, and the sun was doing the rest.
“How’s my house?” Pops asked.
“Still standing, but I broke your coffee maker.”
“Which one?”
“The fancy one.”
“Your father’s going to kill you. That’s the one he shipped from Italy.”
The espresso machine was fine. It had been fine since the day Dad unpacked it, aligned it on the counter like a museum piece, and spent twenty minutes explaining the pressure settings. Asher and Pops had been telling him it was broken ever since.
“It was already making a noise.” Asher sat up straighter on the lounger, committing to the bit.
“It’s an espresso machine, Asher, it makes noises. That’s what it does.”
“This was a different noise. A bad noise. A noise that said ‘I’m about to stop working forever.’”
“Buy him a new one before he finds out.” Asher shifted the phone to his other ear.
“Already ordered.”
Pops’s laugh was warm and close. “How’s camp? Braun treating you okay?”
“Braun doesn’t treat anyone any way. He watches. He takes notes. Occasionally, he says something that sounds like criticism but is actually a compliment if you parse it.”
“Sounds like your father.”
“That’s what I said.” Asher pulled his cap lower against the sun.
A pause, and then Pops’s voice changed. “You catching for Henley yet?”
“Yesterday, two innings of live BP. His fastball sits ninety-five.”
“How’d it feel?”
“Like the real thing.” Asher heard himself say it and let the rest sit there unspoken.
He’d be sent down when rosters finalized.
He knew that. Everyone knew that. But for three weeks, he was catching big-league arms in a big-league facility with his name on a locker.
Some mornings, the gap between where he was and where he wanted to be felt like nothing at all.
“You’re quiet,” Pops said.
“I’m thinking.”
“About?”
“About how I’ve wanted this since I was nine years old and I’m still not sure I’m allowed to want it this much.”
Pops didn’t say anything for a moment. The patient kind of silence, from someone who’d decided the next words belonged to Asher and was willing to wait.
“You’re allowed,” Pops said. “For the record.”
“Thanks, Pops.” The word came out smaller than he’d intended, and Pops let the moment breathe before changing direction.
“Now tell me about the hockey player.”
Asher closed his eyes. “How do you know about the hockey player?”
“I know about the hockey player because you’ve mentioned hockey four times in two weeks and you’ve never mentioned hockey in your life. And because your father told me you asked him what the expansion draft was, which is not a question a person asks for fun.”
“You’re not going to let the hockey player thing go, are you?”
“I’ve been letting it go. I’m extremely good at letting things go. I’m letting it go right now, while also asking about it because I’m a multitasker.”
Asher pulled off his sunglasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I met a guy at the gala. A hockey player. We’ve been talking.”
“Talking.” Pops let the word sit there, loaded and patient.
“Texting, calling, FaceTiming. Talking.”
“And you’re not going to tell me who he is.”
“Not yet.” He wasn’t sure how to explain it without it sounding like more than it was. He hadn’t asked Patrick if this was something he told people about. He wasn’t going to be the one to decide that. “It’s new, Pops. I don’t even know what it is yet.”
“Okay.” No push. Just the word, and then a beat. “So tell me what he’s like without telling me who he is.”
Asher closed his eyes against the sun. “He’s different.”
“Different how?”
“Different in the way where I’m not putting on a show when I talk to him.
Different in the way where he doesn’t laugh at my jokes to be polite.
He just doesn’t laugh, and when he nearly does, it’s better than when anyone else actually laughs.
Different in the way where…” He pressed the heel of his hand against his eye. “He’s just different, Pops.”
Pops was quiet for a long moment. Waiting, the way he always waited, without filling the space.
“Your dad and I didn’t plan on falling in love either,” Pops said. “For what that’s worth.”
“It’s not,” Asher started.
“I know. It’s not that. It’s fun. It’s flirting. It doesn’t have to mean anything.” Easy, unbothered, utterly without pressure. “I’m just saying. Nobody plans it.”
Asher leaned back on the lounger. The sky above was empty, uninterrupted blue from one edge of his vision to the other.
A different sky than Patrick was under. And still the first thing Asher had done this morning was check whether Patrick had sent a message overnight.
The message had been there—Early skate. Kubara took a puck to the chin.
Blood everywhere. He’s fine. How do you sleep this late? —and Asher had read it three times.
“He sounds like your father,” Pops said. “From the way you’re not describing him.”
“Don’t ruin this for me.”
Pops laughed, long and unhurried, the same one Asher had spent his whole life trying to get. “I’m not ruining anything. I’m observing. You’ve got a type. The type is ‘quiet, intense, fundamentally decent people who don’t know how to have fun.’ It tracks.”
“He has fun.” Asher wasn’t sure why he was defending this so hard, except that he was sure it was true.
“Does he though?”
“He does with me.”
Pops went quiet. When he spoke, the humor was still there, but softer.
“Then don’t waste it, kid.”
They talked for a few more minutes. Pops updated him on a home repair project Dad had insisted on managing himself, which was going as well as anyone who knew him would expect. Asher listened and laughed in the right places and felt the call settle him the way Pops’s calls always did.
He hung up and picked up his phone to open the camera. He took a photo from the lounger: his bare feet in the foreground, the pool beyond them, the desert mountains in the background, the whole frame washed in gold light.
He sent it to Patrick without a caption.
Patrick
Show-off. It’s still snowing here.
Asher smiled at the phone.
You need someone to send you weather updates from somewhere that isn’t miserable.
I have the Weather Channel.
The Weather Channel doesn’t have this view.
The dots appeared, disappeared, appeared again.
No. It doesn’t.
Asher set the phone down. He was in trouble, and he knew the exact shape of it because he’d walked up to this line before and he’d always stepped back over it in time.
This was the part where he was supposed to get out.
Three weeks in the desert, a thousand miles, a perfect built-in reason to let the messages stretch and thin until they quit.
Patrick was a closed door in a city Asher didn’t live in, in a sport that could ship him anywhere on a Tuesday.
Every reason he’d given himself on the drive home from Chicago was still true.
He had a whole career not to ruin and no business handing a piece of himself to a man who’d eventually do the math everyone else had done and figure out that Asher wasn’t someone you stayed for.
That was the move. Step back over the line. Leave first.
He picked the phone up again to see if Patrick had written back.