Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
Bottom of the sixth, Asher drove a slider into the right-center gap and pulled into second standing up, and as the dust settled around his cleats, he did the thing he’d caught himself doing all week. He looked for Patrick.
He found him a dozen rows up behind the plate, in the seat he’d taken every night of the homestand, a guy in a plain ballcap nobody would clock as an NHL defenseman.
He watched with the same flat, total focus he brought to a hockey game, except tonight it was aimed at Asher, and when the ball found the gap, he came up out of his seat with the rest of the section.
Asher stood on second in the late-May heat with his pulse still up and grinned at the dirt like an idiot.
He’d never once played in front of someone who’d cleared his whole week just to sit in a ballpark and watch him.
Apparently, that was all it took to undo him completely.
He came around to score, and when the inning ended, he pulled his gear back on and went out for the top of the seventh, which used to be the kind of inning that came apart in his hands.
The bases were loaded, one out, and the lefty cleanup hitter had already squared up two balls off him.
A year ago, Asher would have been three pitches ahead of himself, second-guessing the sequence, gripping the ball.
Tonight, his head stayed quiet. The lefty chased a slider in the dirt for strike three and a soft tapper in front of the plate ended the inning.
Delgado caught him in the dugout between innings, a hand on his shoulder, and didn’t waste words.
“You keep catching like this, people upstairs are going to run out of reasons to leave you down here.” He let it sit. “This is the guy who gets the call, Tuck. Don’t change a thing.”
It was the sentence Asher had been chasing since he was eighteen, and his first instinct, before he’d even gotten his glove off, was to find Patrick in the stands.
Not because Patrick could have heard a word of it from up there, but because telling him was suddenly the first thing Asher wanted to do.
Patrick was waiting by the truck when Asher finally came out, showered and changed, ballcap low, hands in his pockets, in no apparent hurry to be anywhere. He pushed off the door when he saw him coming.
“You got greedy on the slider in the eighth,” Patrick said.
“I went three for four and threw a guy out, but sure, let’s lead with the slider.” Asher dug out his keys and reached past Patrick for the door. Patrick didn’t give him the room, so they ended up close in the dark of the half-empty lot.
“You dropped your hands.”
“My hands are perfect. My hands are the one part of me that has never let me down.” Asher didn’t step back, and neither did Patrick. “You’ve sat through one homestand, and now you think you understand baseball.”
“I understand you dropped your hands.” But he said it low as he reached up and pushed a damp strand of hair off Asher’s forehead, unhurried, the lot quiet and nearly empty around them.
And that was what got Asher, not the touch itself but the ease of it.
He’d had spent the spring keeping a careful count of every place they made contact, and somewhere in the last few weeks, he’d quit counting.
They got in.
The drive back to his apartment took ten minutes, Patrick’s hand on his thigh the whole way, not doing anything, just there. Asher turned the radio low and let the quiet sit, which he never did with anyone, and it didn’t feel like work.
Inside, he dug through the fridge for something to feed them both, and Patrick leaned against the counter, watching his hands like they were going to teach him something.
“Delgado pulled me aside tonight,” Asher said to the inside of the fridge because saying it to Patrick’s face would have meant admitting how badly he wanted it. “Told me I’m the guy who gets the call, and not to change a thing.”
The quiet behind him shifted. He came out of the fridge with the eggs and a foil-wrapped something he didn’t really look at, bumped the door shut with his hip, and turned.
Patrick wasn’t leaning anymore. He’d come off the counter, the crease gone from between his eyebrows, his whole attention on Asher all at once.
“Asher.” Patrick said his name like it was the rest of the sentence. “That’s got to feel good.”
Asher shrugged. “I mean, it always feels good to hear you’re playing well, but it’s just Coach. I’m still waiting for an actual call-up.”
“Sure, but at least you know you’re getting closer.” Patrick crossed the kitchen and reached for Asher without effort, one hand at his jaw, and the rest of Asher’s brain went quietly offline. “I’ve watched you all week. You earned it. Every word.”
And it wasn’t really the praise. His dads came to his games when the schedule let them and meant every word they said, and his friends were always good for a round and a slap on the back.
This one landed somewhere else because it came from Patrick, and what Asher felt for him had long since stopped being something he could pretend was casual.
He kissed Patrick in the kitchen with the lights on and didn’t reach for a joke.
Patrick woke early, even with nowhere to be. Asher had surfaced most mornings of that week to the shower already running, or to Patrick already up and dressed and moving around the kitchen.
This particular morning, Asher came out and found Patrick at the counter with the little French press he took everywhere he went because of course he did.
He worked at it unhurried and exact. Asher stopped in the doorway in his boxers and watched him, a guarded Chicago hockey player perfectly at home in Asher’s kitchen at seven in the morning.
He’d wanted Patrick since January. That part he was used to.
What kept sneaking up on him was how ordinary it had started to feel having him here.
Patrick up before him and moving around the place like it was nothing, like it was just where he was supposed to be.
“You packed a coffee maker,” Asher said from the doorway. “You drove all the way up here, and you packed your own coffee maker.”
“I packed a French press.” Patrick didn’t turn around. “It weighs nothing, and it means I never have to find out what you’d have made me drink.”
“I’d have made you drink coffee. From my coffee maker. Like a normal person.”
“Mm.”
“You’re a snob, Fontaine.”
“I’m aware.”
Patrick handed him a mug, and it was, infuriatingly, the best coffee Asher had had in months.
Far better than the swill he used to make.
He leaned against the counter beside a man who’d packed his own coffee gear because it was his new obsession, and the thought came at him sideways, the kind he’d taught himself not to trust. I could have this.
Not someday, but now, this summer, for real.
Patrick was close enough to drive to on an off day.
It was almost identical to the gap Asher’s dads had to overcome when they first got together.
So it wasn’t a fantasy he had to talk himself out of.
It was a real thing he could actually have—Patrick in a borrowed T-shirt in his kitchen, the most reachable thing Asher had ever let himself want.
He didn’t say any of it aloud. He let himself have the morning instead, and it was the best one he’d had in a long time.
That afternoon, before batting practice, Briggs leaned across the locker and turned his phone to face him.
“Isn’t this your buddy?”
The headline ran bold across the top.
Expansion Draft Watch: The Ten Players Most Likely to Land in Santa Fe
Patrick was under it in his Syndicate sweater, mid-shift, eyes down on a puck Asher couldn’t see.
They had him ranked third. The paragraph beside the photo was the cold kind, all contract value and minutes and cap math, ending on a line about how hard the Syndicate would find it to protect him.
Fontaine is viewed as more expendable than the offensive core.
It was a hell of a word for a man who’d spent a whole season throwing his body in front of pucks so other guys could be the offensive core.
“That’s him,” Asher said and handed the phone back.
“He worried about it?”
“He hasn’t said.”
He kept it easy for Briggs, but the words landed wrong because they were true: Patrick hadn’t said.
Until that headline got three inches from Asher’s face, he hadn’t known there was a draft to worry about at all, hadn’t known Patrick could be pulled out of Chicago and handed to a brand-new team by people he’d never met.
He’d spent the best week he could remember with no idea it was coming.
Briggs gave him the look of a man who knew the difference between hasn’t said and hasn’t said to me. “Number three sounds like it’s a pretty good bet he’ll get picked up by the new team.”
It did. Asher took it into the cage and hit until his wrists ached, the ball ringing off the back netting like a fist on a wall, and it didn’t help because the problem wasn’t in his swing.
It was that Patrick had known. You didn’t land at number three on a list like that overnight.
He’d been carrying it the whole time and never let it show, and he’d let Asher go on believing the ground under them was solid.
If Santa Fe drafted him, he’d be gone by fall, and the life Asher had spent all week letting himself want would go with him.
Asher tried that night. They’d turned the lights off and left the window open to the warm dark, and he lay there working up to it longer than he wanted to.
“That draft thing Briggs showed me today,” he said. “They had you at number three.”
Patrick didn’t move. “Mock lists. People make them all summer.”
“And if it’s not just a list. If they actually take you.”
“Then they take me.” Flat, even, giving nothing away. “Nothing I do between now and then changes it. No point spending one of these nights on it.”
It was a reasonable thing to say, and it was also a door, shut gently with Asher on the wrong side of it.
He let it go because pushing Patrick had never once worked and because he didn’t want to lose the night either.
But he filed it away. It was the one part of himself Patrick still wouldn’t let him near.
The last night of the homestand, neither of them moved off the couch.
Asher’s game had been that afternoon. Now it was late, and there was a different one on the TV that neither of them was watching.
Patrick had his feet in Asher’s lap, and Asher had a hand loose around one ankle, his thumb tracking the bone with no say in the matter.
In the morning, Asher left on a road trip, which meant Patrick had no reason to stay.
He’d drive back to Chicago, and the two of them would go back to being a phone call after a game.
He’d spent the whole week not counting, and now he couldn’t stop.
By tomorrow night, he’d be in a hotel in some other city, and Patrick would be alone in his apartment in Chicago.
The week of waking up to someone, of reaching over in the dark and finding him there, would be over.
And under all of it sat the draft, the thing he’d raised once and Patrick had brushed off, still between them and about to ride back to Chicago unspoken.
He’d known the visit had an ending on it the whole time.
He’d just managed to forget the bigger one sitting right behind it.
“You’re quiet,” Patrick said, which was rich, coming from him.
“I’m relaxed. There’s a difference. You wouldn’t know it.”
“I know it.” Patrick nudged him with a heel. “What?”
And there was the door, standing open. I saw the article. I know what it could mean. Talk to me about it. Tell me you’re scared, because I am. Asher had the words lined up and ready.
“Nothing,” he said. “Just don’t want you to go yet.”
He’d meant it as a joke. It hadn’t come out as one.
Something moved across Patrick’s face, there and gone, the first thing Asher had seen on it all week that he didn’t like.
Then Patrick reached down and laced their fingers together on his own shin, which was an answer, of a kind, just not the one Asher had asked for.
“You leave in the morning,” Patrick said. “You’ve got your road trip. I’ve got an apartment to go sit in.”
“You make it sound so appealing.”
“I’m a romantic.”
Asher laughed and let him have the deflection. Pushing Patrick had never once gotten him anywhere, and he didn’t actually want the answer tonight. He wanted the ankle in his hand, the lights low, the hard part put off until morning. He let himself have that.
Later they went to bed, and in the dark, Asher felt Patrick let go of the day, breath slowing, the tight set of him easing off, the guard all the way down—which Patrick only allowed when he was sure Asher was asleep.
Asher stayed awake for it on purpose. It was the most unguarded Patrick ever got, and he wasn’t about to sleep through it.
He lay awake long after Patrick’s breathing went slow beside him, his hand flat between Patrick’s shoulder blades, feeling it lift and fall. Whatever was coming, Patrick wasn’t going to let him in on it tonight, and for now, Asher had no moves left but to stay quiet and follow his lead.