Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
Asher had cleaned the apartment twice, changed the sheets, and was now sitting on his couch, working hard to look like a man who had done neither.
Patrick was coming. Asher had spent the morning waiting for the text that called it off—because that was how these things usually went—but it hadn’t come.
Patrick only had a few days before the playoffs swallowed his month, and he was spending one of them driving up to Appleton.
Asher didn’t know what to do with that. Nobody spent a day they could’ve kept for themselves on him.
Monday meant no game, just a lift, an hour of PT on the knee, then a cage session Asher cut short because his head wasn’t in it. It hadn’t been Saturday either, when he’d gone zero-for-four, the quiet kind, and Delgado pulled him aside after.
“Get your head right,” Delgado had told him. “Wherever it is, go get it.” Then, on his way out, he’d turned back. “And ease up. The big club’s been asking about you. Navarro’s wrist has him day-to-day again, and your name keeps coming up in their meetings. Don’t make them watch you press.”
Lately their whole thing had lived on the phone, Patrick’s voice in the dark after both their games, the two of them too wrecked to make much sense. Today Patrick would be here in person, and Asher had given up on getting anything done in the meantime.
The buzzer went a little after four.
Asher let him up and had the door open before Patrick reached it. He came down the hall, bag on his shoulder, road-rumpled from the drive, and the pull in Asher’s chest was as stupid and certain as it had been since the gala. Patrick stopped in front of him, close, not touching yet.
“Hi,” Asher said.
“Hi.”
Asher got the door shut, and then they weren’t talking.
He had a fistful of Patrick’s shirt, and Patrick had a hand at the back of his neck, and the kiss landed like the end of something they’d both been holding through weeks of bad timing and a phone screen.
Patrick tasted like coffee and the drive.
His bag hit the floor. Asher backed him into the wall by the door and kept him there, and the sound Patrick made, low and surprised and gone the second it surfaced, went straight down Asher’s spine.
He made himself stop while he still could. He pulled back an inch, breathing hard, his forehead against Patrick’s.
“Okay,” he said. “Hi.”
“You said that.”
“Sorry. You rendered me stupid with that kiss.” He stepped back because they had the whole night and he didn’t want to spend the first ten minutes against a wall. “Come in. Sit down. Let me feed you before I jump you. I’ve got standards. Low ones, but they’re standards.”
Patrick came in. He set his bag by the couch and looked around, taking the measure of the place the way he took the measure of everything.
It was lived-in in a way Patrick’s bare apartment never was, warm and a little cluttered, Asher’s whole personality left out on every surface. Asher watched him take it in.
“What?” Asher said.
“Nothing. It’s you. The whole place is you.”
Asher didn’t have a comeback for that, which was happening to him more and more.
He’d made food, actually made it, which Pops would have demanded a photo of. They ate at the small table, and between bites, Patrick talked about the series because that was what the nerves did to him. Two days out, and he was already living in it.
“Toronto’s fast,” Patrick said. “Their top-line transitions are quicker than anyone we’ve played all year. If we can’t control the neutral zone in the first two games, the series tilts.”
“You’ll control it. That’s your whole thing.”
“The regular season doesn’t count for anything now.
It’s one team for an entire series, both sides studying tape till they know your tendencies cold.
It comes down to who shuts down whose best guys.
” He turned his fork over. “First one’s Wednesday.
I haven’t been able to think about much else for a week. ”
“Then it’s you they should be worried about.” Asher pointed his fork at him. “I’ve watched you play for months. You get sharper when the stakes go up. Your gap control tightens, your stick positioning gets meaner.”
Patrick looked at him across the table, caught off guard at having his own game handed back to him by somebody who’d been watching the parts nobody else did.
“You watch a lot of hockey for a baseball player,” Patrick said.
“I watch a lot of your hockey. There’s a difference.”
Patrick picked up his water and drank. The pause was longer than the sip required.
The talk wound down on its own, and Asher let it. For once, he didn’t reach for something to fill the quiet. The want had been building under the whole meal, and now there was nothing left on the table to pretend it was about.
Patrick set his fork down and looked at him, taking his time, and this time, he wasn’t bothering to hide the heat under it.
Asher closed the distance first.
This kiss was nothing like the one at the door.
It was slow and certain, Patrick’s hand coming up to the side of Asher’s neck, thumb against his jaw.
Asher’s whole body went hot, sudden and thorough, in his hips, his hands, the base of his spine.
He fisted the back of Patrick’s shirt and felt the muscle shift underneath it.
When he bit Patrick’s lower lip, the sound Patrick made was quiet but hot, and it sent a spike of want through Asher that was sharp enough to hurt.
The last time they’d had their hands on each other, they’d had to stop before either of them wanted to.
Not tonight. Asher could feel the difference in Patrick’s hold, the other hand finding his hip and pulling, closing the last inch, and the press of him, chest to hip, was so much at once that Asher had to break the kiss just to breathe.
“I’ve got it bad for you,” Asher said. He hadn’t planned to say it, but he didn’t take it back.
“I know,” Patrick said, and then, quieter, “I’ve got it worse.”
“I’m not sure that’s possible,” Asher said.
They didn’t make it far. The bedroom was down a short hall.
They made a mess of getting there, Asher’s back against the wall once, Patrick’s thigh between his legs, his shirt lost somewhere behind them.
The room was dark. Asher reached past Patrick and left the hall light on, just enough to see by.
This was the part that scared him, getting looked at this close with no joke to hide behind.
Patrick was about to see the version of him nobody else got, and Asher let him.
He kissed Patrick instead of finishing the thought.
They fell onto the bed together, and the urgency changed, the hallway scramble giving way to something slower now that there was no reason to rush.
Asher was on his back with Patrick braced over him, one forearm beside his head, the other hand tracing a line down his sternum to his belt with a focus so precise that Asher exhaled something close to a laugh.
“What?” Patrick said.
“Nothing. You’re concentrating like there’s a quiz after.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Then quit thinking so hard and get my pants off.”
Patrick undid his belt with one hand, the buckle, the leather, the button of his jeans, and the efficiency of it emptied Asher’s head.
He pushed the jeans down and Asher kicked them off, and then Patrick’s hand was on him through his briefs, direct and unhesitating, and Asher’s hips came up off the mattress.
“Fuck,” he managed.
Patrick’s mouth was on his neck, below his ear, the hinge of his jaw, the hollow of his throat, his hand keeping a rhythm through the cotton until Asher couldn’t hold still. He arched into it and reached for the waistband of Patrick’s joggers, needing them gone.
Patrick stripped them off, the underwear with them, and Asher did the same, the two of them bare together for the first time. The want in Patrick’s face was so open that Asher’s breath caught.
Patrick’s body settled over his, heavy, and Asher went still under the weight of him, steadied by it. He got a hand around Patrick, thick and hot against his palm, and the shudder that went through Patrick was full-body, his hips pushing into the contact before the rest of him decided to allow it.
“Tell me what you want,” Asher said, his voice stripped of its usual ease.
Patrick kissed him instead of answering, deep and slow, and when he pulled back, his voice was rough. “This. You. It’s been a while.”
“Then we go slow.”
They went slow. There was no rush this time and nowhere either of them had to be, and Asher meant to take Patrick apart with all the time they’d never had.
He rolled Patrick onto his back and settled over him, kissing him slow and deep until Patrick’s hands came up restless and gripping, like he couldn’t decide whether to pull Asher closer or just hold on.
Asher worked his way down. He pressed his lips to the hollow of Patrick’s throat, the line of his sternum, the ridge of muscle over his ribs that jumped under his mouth.
Lower to the cut of his hip, the crease of his thigh, deliberately not where Patrick wanted him, until Patrick’s hips came off the bed, chasing it.
“Patience,” Asher murmured against his skin, and Patrick’s whole body went tight at the word.
Then he stopped teasing. He took Patrick’s cock into his mouth slowly, all the way down, and the sound that tore out of Patrick was nothing like his careful voice on the phone.
Asher had wanted this longer than he’d ever told him, the weight and heat of him on his tongue.
He gave it everything, tongue, suction, the slow drag of his lips, one hand wrapped around the base.
He pulled off just to look, slick mouth, slick cock, Patrick spread out and coming undone in the low light.
“You should see yourself,” Asher said, his hand still working him slowly. “All that control, and you’re falling apart on my tongue.” He licked back up the length of him and tongued the head until Patrick’s hips jerked. “We’ve got all night, and I’m going to use every minute of it on you.”