Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
The puck rimmed around the boards, and Patrick read the play before it developed—his partner pinching to retrieve, the opposing center driving the net, and Patrick holding the middle with under four minutes left and the Syndicate up by one.
He knew where the center was going. He knew which lane to close.
His skates should have already been moving.
They weren’t. The center cut across the slot, and the pass threaded through the space Patrick’s stick should have occupied. The winger one-timed it past Kubara’s glove. Tie game, and the visiting bench erupted while the home crowd went quiet.
They lost in overtime on a two-on-one. Patrick was on the bench for the shift, watching a breakaway develop in the neutral zone with nothing he could do about it. The puck crossed the line and the arena stayed silent except for the visiting team piling onto each other at center ice.
Nobody talked in the locker room. Guys unlaced their skates with their heads down. Kubara sat in his stall with his elbows on his knees and his mouth shut.
Patrick showered and dressed. He was pulling on his jacket when Pruitt knocked into his shoulder on the way past, not hard, just enough to be felt. “Good game, Fonty. Forget the rest.” Patrick nodded without answering, and Pruitt didn’t wait for one.
The hallway between the locker room and the parking garage was quiet. One of the equipment managers was wheeling a cart of sticks toward the storage room and caught Patrick’s eye as he passed. “Helluva game, twenty-six. Get some rest.” Patrick raised a hand and kept walking.
He drove home with the radio off and the goal on loop—the lane, the gap, his skates not moving. By the time he was standing in his kitchen, he’d watched himself lose that half-second a hundred times, and it hadn’t given him anything back.
He pulled his phone out of his jacket pocket and set it on the counter. Three texts from Asher.
Watching the stream. You just laid out that guy on the forecheck. Violent. I approve.
That wasn’t on you.
Call me if you want. Or don’t. I’m here either way.
The first had come during the second period. The second after the tying goal. The third, fourteen minutes ago.
Patrick set the phone down, picked it up, set it down again. Then he called.
Asher picked up on the second ring. No greeting, just the sound of settling in, a creak that might have been a couch spring, and then his voice.
“Hey.”
“Hey.” Patrick leaned against the counter with the kitchen light off.
“Rough one,” Asher said.
“Yeah.” Patrick waited for the reassurance, the spin, the upbeat reframe people gave after losses because silence made them uncomfortable.
His teammates did it. His mother did it.
Marc did it, wrapping the platitude in agent-speak so it sounded like strategy instead of comfort. Asher didn’t say any of it.
The line stayed open. Asher was there, breathing, and the quiet between them settled into the same rhythm as the late-night FaceTime calls, where neither of them needed it to be anything more than this.
Patrick had never had that with anyone who wasn’t family.
After a loss, his teammates clapped his pads, said good game, and went home to their own lives.
His mother called and told him to eat something.
Marc texted something about the big picture. Nobody just stayed on the line.
“I was late,” Patrick said. He hadn’t meant to say it.
“On the tying goal?”
“My gap was too wide. I knew where the center was going and my feet didn’t get there.”
“Okay.”
Not that happens to everyone, not you’ll get it next time. Just okay. Patrick had told the truth about what happened on the ice, and Asher had taken it without flinching or trying to reshape it into something more comfortable.
“Okay,” Patrick repeated, and some of the tightness he’d been carrying since the third period loosened.
They stayed on the line. Fireflies camp had started the week before, and Asher was still in Arizona, now splitting time between the big-league complex and the minor-league facility down the road.
He talked about a pitcher who’d been moved to the bullpen and was handling the demotion with theatrical grief, a tantrum involving a bucket of baseballs and the bullpen coach’s rapidly thinning patience.
Patrick listened to the sound of his voice more than the story itself, easy and warm, filling the kitchen.
Patrick pushed off the counter and walked to the couch without thinking about it, settling into the corner with his legs stretched out and the phone against his ear.
“Thanks,” Patrick said. “For picking up.”
“You called me. That’s not nothing from you.”
Patrick almost smiled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’d rather chew glass than ask someone for something, and you called me, and I’m choosing not to make a big deal out of it even though I want to.”
“Appreciate the restraint.”
“It’s killing me. You have no idea.”
“You’ll survive.” The breath left Patrick before he could catch it, something between a laugh and the sound a person makes when they’ve been holding their breath too long. “I should sleep.”
“Yeah. Early skate?”
“Always.”
“Then go. I’ll be here tomorrow.”
Asher said it casually, but Patrick held the words longer than he should have.
I’ll be here tomorrow. People said that.
It wasn’t unusual. But Asher had also been here tonight, and last Tuesday, and the Saturday before that, and he kept showing up without being asked and without making it a thing Patrick had to acknowledge or repay.
It was the easiest thing anyone had given him in a long time, and he didn’t know what to do with that either.
“Goodnight, Asher.”
“Night, Patrick. Set your alarm.”
“It’s already set.”
“I know.”
Patrick hung up and stayed on the couch for a while, the apartment quiet around him. Eventually, he got up and went to bed.
He fell asleep faster than he had in weeks.
The Syndicate won three of their next four games.
Patrick’s game was steady, the kind of stretch where nothing spectacular happened and nothing went wrong, which was the best version of how he played.
Barlow started pairing him with Toews, the rookie defenseman, for the tougher matchups.
Patrick talked him through reads between shifts without being asked.
“Fonty’s in dad mode,” Pruitt announced to the locker room after the win. “He’s adopting the rookies. Someone get him a whistle and a clipboard.”
“Leave him alone, Pru.” Kubara didn’t look up from his phone.
“I’m complimenting him. I’m saying he’s got range.”
“You’re saying words. Some of them are in the right order.”
Patrick peeled off his jersey and shoulder pads in one motion and dropped them in the stall.
Dev was beside him, pulling tape from his wrists. Lindy was two stalls down, head bent over his phone, close enough that his equipment bag touched Dev’s. Dev’s gaze tracked to Lindy, seemingly involuntary but brief, and returned to the tape. Patrick saw it.
Dev caught him looking, held it for a beat, and said nothing. Patrick turned back to his stall and started on his skates.
“You’re different,” Dev said. Pitched below the room’s volume, aimed at the two of them. Eyes down, still working tape.
“I’m the same.”
“You talked to Toews between every shift tonight. I’ve been next to you for three years, and you’ve never said ten words to me voluntarily.”
Patrick pulled the left skate free and set it on the mat. “He needed help with his gaps.”
“Sure.” Dev tossed the tape. “Different isn’t bad though. Just out of character for you.”
He stood, grabbed his towel, and headed for the showers.
His path took him past Lindy’s stall, and as he passed, his hand landed on the back of Lindy’s chair, not Lindy, just the chair, a contact that could have been accidental and was not.
Lindy’s head came up for a second, tracking Dev across the room, before dropping back to the screen.
Patrick finished undressing, showered, and drove home. He made dinner, ate standing up, and called Asher while he was cleaning the pan.
Asher picked up mid-sentence, already talking to someone else. “—because he’s been staring at samples for three days, and I’m not getting involved. Hey.”
“Hey.” Patrick set the pan in the drying rack. “Who’s staring at samples?”
“Dad. He’s redoing the kitchen countertops. Pops flew in this morning, supposedly for sun, but I think he’s escaping the renovation. He’s been in the guest room for six hours, refusing to have an opinion about granite.”
Patrick could hear someone in the background, a voice he didn’t recognize, warm and carrying.
“Is that him?” Patrick asked.
“Yeah. He’s— Hold on.” The phone shifted, muffled, and Patrick heard Asher say something he couldn’t make out. Then, clearer, “Pops, I’m on the phone.”
The background voice got louder, theatrical and amused. “With the hockey player?”
A pause. Asher came back. “He knows there’s a hockey player. He doesn’t know anything else. He’s been calling you ‘the hockey player’ for two weeks. I think he’s hoping to catch me in a weak moment so I’ll slip and say your name.”
Patrick leaned against the counter. “How does he know I play hockey?”
“Because I asked Dad what the expansion draft was, and Pops was in the room, and apparently, that’s all it takes.
” Asher’s voice dropped. “I told him I’ve been talking to someone.
That’s it. He’s not as dumb as he tries to play, so he put two and two together.
” Asher’s voice dropped. “I didn’t use your name. I wouldn’t, not without asking.”
The background voice again, louder now, like his pops was right next to Asher. “He’s being super secretive. He doesn’t realize that makes me think it’s serious. But I promise I won’t push him too hard.”
“I’m going outside,” Asher said, and Patrick heard a door slide open and close, and then the background went quiet, just desert air and evening.
“Sorry. He’s a lot.”
“He sounds like a lot.”
“He’s great. He’s just nosy as hell. He doesn’t want me to hide the way he and Dad had to. Ever since he realized I’m interested in someone, he’s been relentless.” A beat. “Does that bother you?”
Patrick thought about it. Someone in Asher’s life knew he existed.
Not his name, not his team, just the fact of him—and somehow that felt bigger than the details would have.
It should have felt like exposure. It didn’t.
What it felt like was that Asher had been talking about him to the people who mattered, and Patrick wasn’t ready to look at how much he liked that.
“No,” Patrick said. “It doesn’t bother me.”
“Okay.” Asher’s voice was careful in a way it rarely was. “Good.”
They talked until Patrick’s eyes were heavy and the apartment was dark around him. He’d moved to the couch at some point, stretched out with the phone against his ear, listening to Asher describe a play at the plate that had gone wrong in three different ways.
“I should sleep,” Patrick said.
“Yeah. Early skate?”
“Always.”
“Go. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“Hey, Asher? You can tell him my name so he quits goading you.”
The silence on the other end lasted long enough that Patrick almost checked if the call had dropped.
“Yeah?” Asher said.
“Yeah.”
Patrick hung up and set the phone on his chest. He stared at the ceiling for a long time.