Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
The Syndicate clinched a playoff spot on a Thursday, in Columbus, with Patrick on the ice for the final two minutes of a game they won by three.
They’d needed one point from their last two and took the whole thing in the first, a flat, structural win nobody would remember by morning.
Patrick logged twenty-four minutes, blocked two shots, and sprang the breakaway with a stretch pass in the second.
When the horn went, Patrick tapped gloves down the line, took a shove from Pruitt, and for once, didn’t go looking for what came next.
They’d clinched with a game to spare. He stood in the noise with the guys banging their sticks on the boards and let himself be glad.
The celebration was still going, Pruitt loudest of anyone, when Patrick got to his stall. He dropped onto the bench and stayed there longer than he needed to, in no hurry to get home to the quiet.
Dev dropped into the stall beside him. “Bar. You’re coming.”
“Yeah, okay.”
That got a grin out of Dev. “No fight? Somebody check his head.”
“It’s the clinch.”
“You hate bars. You’ve told me, more than once, they’re where conversation goes to die.”
“I’m making an exception.” Patrick reached down and pulled his skates off, his feet aching back to life.
“Huh.” Dev was still grinning. “Look at you. Being a whole person.”
“Don’t.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
A bar near the hotel took all twelve of them at a back table.
Patrick ordered one beer and made it last. Dev sat beside him, nursed two beers, and didn’t try to make him talk.
Patrick had always liked that about him.
Pruitt told a story that grew a foot each lap of the table.
Down at the end, Lindy, the kid on the third pairing three weeks up from the AHL, laughed in the right places and didn’t try to be louder than he was.
Patrick noticed because it was what he’d done at that age, when the room was still deciding about you.
Once, under Pruitt’s noise, Lindy muttered something dry that only Dev was close enough to catch, and Dev huffed a laugh into his beer. That was the whole of it.
Patrick’s phone buzzed against his thigh.
Yeah, baby! That stretch pass was filthy as hell! You should know I rewound it four times just to watch you in action.
The next one landed a minute behind it.
Congratulations, Patrick.
The first was Asher at full volume. The second came in quieter, no exclamation point, no bit, just his name. Patrick had learned to listen for the second voice under the first.
Thank you.
Probably for the best I’m out of town. Otherwise, I’d be tempted to drive down there and give you a proper congratulations. What’s your schedule looking like?
Patrick read the question twice. He didn’t have an answer to give.
Round one opened the following week, but the league hadn’t set the bracket yet.
He didn’t know who they’d draw, what nights, what cities.
He knew the trip ended tomorrow. He knew that two states west, Asher had a game tomorrow and the day after and most of the days after those.
That was the trouble with the question. Neither of them could answer it yet.
Not sure yet. You’re home next week, right? Maybe I can come up and watch you play for a change.
I’d lose it if you actually showed up. No pressure though. I know what your next month looks like.
He put the phone away. Dev was watching him.
“Good news?” Dev said.
“We clinched. You were there.” Patrick reached for his beer.
“That’s not what I’m asking, and you know it.”
“I know.”
Dev took a sip and left it alone.
Home was the way he’d left it. Clean counters, filtered light, the quiet he used to think of as the point of the place. He didn’t think of it that way anymore. The quiet had started sounding like what it actually was: empty.
What was left of the regular season was a short stretch, a few home games and a last road trip, then the playoffs. None of it had room for Asher. What they had instead was the phone.
The calls landed late, after both their games, and ran short because they were wrecked by the time they aligned.
One night, Asher fell asleep mid-sentence.
Patrick stayed on the line and listened to him breathe a while before he hung up.
They went over the schedules aloud more than once.
Between them was a wall of games with no door in it, until the season let one of them go.
“It’s a stupid amount of work,” Asher said one night, not complaining, just naming it. “Wanting to be in the same room as a person.”
“Yeah,” Patrick said.
“I’m in, for the record. In case all the scheduling talk made it sound like I was hunting for an exit.”
“I know.”
“Just making sure you knew.”
On the flight to the last road series, Dev took the seat beside him, headphones around his neck, and didn’t put them on.
“You’ve been smiling at your phone,” Dev said once the plane leveled off.
“I haven’t.”
“You did it twice at the gate. I’m not making it a thing.” Dev tipped his head back against the seat. “Just saying you’re easier to be around than you were in January.”
Patrick watched the wing. “That obvious?”
“To me. Nobody else is looking. They’re worried about Toronto’s power play.” Dev was quiet for a moment, eyes closed. “You know you can tell me. If there’s ever anything to tell.” His eyes stayed shut. “I’d be the last guy to make it weird.”
It was the nearest either of them had come to it in three years.
In a room like theirs, you kept the personal personal because the wrong word reaching the wrong guy could follow you the length of a career, out players or not.
It didn’t matter that most everyone knew who he was; as long as no one said it out loud, the few bigots could pretend everyone was straight and Patrick could pretend it didn’t piss him off to know they thought less of him for who he slept with.
“I know,” Patrick said. And he did.
“Okay.” Dev let it go at that. He never asked who Patrick went home to, the same way Patrick had never asked him. Some doors you didn’t knock on. You waited for them to open.
They won the road game in overtime, and Patrick blocked a shot with the inside of his ankle that would have him taping it for a week. By the time he got back to the hotel, it was past one, the ankle had its own pulse, and he was too wired to sleep and too sore to do anything useful about it.
He FaceTimed Asher.
Asher picked up on the second ring, in bed, the lamp low behind him, his hair wrecked. He’d had a night game of his own. He looked exhausted and glad, and looking at him took some of the night’s edge off.
“There he is.” Asher had the phone propped somewhere, both hands free, grinning at Patrick like he’d been waiting all day for exactly this. “I stayed up for you. White-knuckled the whole overtime, then lay here hoping you’d call. It’s pathetic, and I don’t care even a little.”
“You won your own game tonight.”
“I did. Barely remember it.” His voice dropped. “Hard to keep your head in a baseball game when you spend it thinking about somebody’s hands.”
Patrick didn’t have an answer for that, or not one he could say aloud. Asher watched him not answer and looked unbearably pleased about it.
“You always listen to me talk about my games,” Patrick said, lower than he meant to. “I want to hear about yours for a change.”
Asher’s grin went soft. “Okay,” he said.
So Asher talked. The game first, the double he’d lined into the gap, the runner he’d thrown out at second by a step and a half, his hands moving at the edges of the frame the way they did when the real him was driving.
Patrick watched and let the sound of it fill the room, easy and constant, a kind of noise he’d spent his whole life keeping out.
He hadn’t known, before this, that he’d been hungry in those clean quiet rooms. He knew now.
At some point, Asher ran out of game and kept talking anyway, rolling into whatever came next, his voice going slower and warmer the later it got.
He shifted down against the pillow. The collar of his shirt slid, and Patrick stopped hearing the words and started watching the line of his throat, the loose way he lay there, the want coming up low and unhurried.
Asher slowed, his eyes sharpening on the screen.
“You’re not listening to me anymore,” he said, the grin going darker. “You’re looking at me like you’ve got plans for me.”
“You’re four hundred miles away,” Patrick said.
“I know. It’s the cruelest thing in the world.” The grin was gone now, replaced by something low and serious. The baseball dropped out of his voice entirely. “Doesn’t have to stop us though. I’ll talk. You do whatever you want with your hands. And I get to watch your face the whole time.”
Patrick’s heart was going hard. He’d spent a lifetime keeping this part of himself behind doors, careful, locked down. He propped the phone where Asher would have the best view, lay back, and let him look.
Asher’s breath went ragged just watching him settle. Then his voice dropped into something Patrick hadn’t heard from him before, low and unhurried and completely in charge.
“Don’t touch yourself yet,” Asher said. “I want to look at you first.”
It should have been nothing, an order from a man four hundred miles away who couldn’t enforce a word of it. Patrick had spent his whole life being the one who set the pace. He went still anyway, hands flat on the mattress, and let Asher look.
“God.” Asher’s own breath had gone uneven, his arm already moving below the edge of the frame. “You have no idea what you look like right now. Okay. Now. Get those underwear off. I want to see all of you.”
Patrick did exactly what he was told.
“Fuck, you’re gorgeous.” Asher licked his lips. “Touch yourself. Pretend it’s my fingers teasing you.”
He wrapped a hand around his cock, and the first stroke pulled a sound out of him he didn’t recognize.
“There it is.” Asher’s voice was wrecked and delighted at once. “Wish that was my hand instead of yours. All that control, and you’d hand it right over to me. Tell me you’ve thought about it. The kitchen. The night I had you up against that counter.”
“I’ve thought about it.” It came out rough, barely his.
“I know you have. Faster now. There you go.” Asher’s eyes never left the screen, and his mouth never stopped.
“You want to know what I wanted that night, after I left you standing in your kitchen and drove home with my hands shaking on the wheel? I wanted to get down on my knees right there. Belt off, jeans open, your hands in my hair, my mouth on you, and I wouldn’t have stopped for anything.
Not for practice. Not for the season. Nothing. ”
Patrick’s hips jerked off the bed. The sound that came out of him was wrecked.
“God yeah. That’s it.” Asher’s voice was unspooling now, fast and filthy and barely holding its shape.
“And next time, there’s no clock. I get you in a real bed, and I take all the time in the world.
I’m going to taste every inch of you. I’m going to take you apart so slowly you forget how to hold still.
I want to know what you sound like with nothing left to keep quiet with.
I’ve wanted to wreck you for months, Patrick. ”
Patrick couldn’t have answered if his life depended on it. He didn’t try. He let Asher’s voice run the whole thing, his own hand barely the point anymore, undone by words alone. On the screen, Asher had his head back and his throat working, gone with it.
“Don’t hold back on me,” Asher breathed. “I want to watch you lose it. Come on, Patrick. Let me see.”
Patrick did. His hips came up off the mattress.
The heat pulled tight and low, and he stopped holding any of it back.
Patrick, who had built a life on holding still and keeping quiet, came apart in a hotel bed to the sound of Asher Tucker entirely unable to stop talking.
He heard Asher go over a few seconds behind him, a sound bitten off around Patrick’s name, and then nothing but the two of them breathing.
After, they lay in their two dark rooms with the phones still on, both of them breathing, neither moving to end it. Asher’s eyes were half-shut. The lamp light lay gold along the side of his face.
Patrick could have said goodnight. He didn’t want to, and he’d spent three months not wanting to and pretending otherwise. His pulse was still coming down. The dark made things easier to say.
“I spent months telling myself this was a bad idea,” he said. “That I couldn’t afford it. That there was no room in my life for something I couldn’t keep control of.”
Asher didn’t reach for a joke or a fix. He just waited.
“I can’t make myself believe any of it anymore.
” Patrick had never said a thing like this aloud to anyone, and he said it now, wrung out and unguarded with Asher’s face soft on the screen.
“I’ve never needed anybody. I don’t know how to do this without trying to manage it, and I can’t manage it.
It scares the hell out of me, but I’m doing it anyway.
I want you to know I’ve stopped fighting it. ”
When Asher answered, the humor had gone out of his voice. “I’ve been there since the gala,” he said. “I was starting to think you’d never say it aloud.”
Patrick almost smiled into the dark, and he didn’t fight that either.
They stayed on the line a while after that, the talk going loose and aimless, neither of them willing to be the one to hang up. Asher’s eyes kept drifting shut.
“Go to sleep,” Patrick said. “You’ve got a game tomorrow.”
“So do you.” Asher didn’t move to end it. He yawned instead. “You said maybe you’d come up. To Appleton.”
“I said maybe.”
“You’ve got a few days before round one though. Before it all kicks off.” The bravado had gone out of his voice, leaving something softer. “We’re home. Come up, spend them with me. No pressure. I just really want you to.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Goodnight, Patrick.”
“Goodnight.”
Patrick set the phone on his chest and lay in the dark.
There were a few empty days coming before round one, the kind he’d always filled with extra ice and video.
Part of him still wanted to. The rest of him wanted to spend them in Appleton, in the life Asher had built up there.
Wanting something that wasn’t the work was new, and it didn’t feel like a weight.
It felt like something to look forward to, and he couldn’t remember the last time anything had.