Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Marc’s name lit Patrick’s phone too early to be good news. Patrick had been up for hours anyway, on the couch with the laptop open, reading his own name on lists of the players nobody would spend a protection slot to keep. He’d read it four times before the sun cleared the buildings.
He answered.
“I talked to Ostrowski’s office again,” Marc said. “We’re close. We’re not done. They’ll write in the no-move. The fight is the term. You want five years. They’re at three.”
Patrick closed the laptop. “Then get them to five.”
“I’m trying. But they’re nervous, and I understand the nerves.
You’re asking them to protect you with a no-move and commit through age thirty-three, on a discount.
Their nightmare is year four, you declining, on a contract they legally can’t move.
That’s a real fear. Waving it off doesn’t make it go away. ”
“This year was the best of my career.”
“It was. And one great year against a no-move that runs past your prime is the exact bet they’re scared to make. So we land in the middle, and we land there before the protection list goes in at the end of the week because after that, there’s no deal left to cut. You’re protected, or you’re gone.”
“I know how it works.”
“Then help me close it. I can get you three years and the no-move. I might squeeze a fourth. What I can’t get you is a decision, and that’s the only thing standing between you and staying.”
Patrick pressed his thumb into the arm of the couch.
“I’ll think about it.”
“That’s what you said last week. They want a yes or a no on a real number, not more thinking.”
“Then they can wait a little longer.”
Marc exhaled. “Okay. But I want you to hear one thing.”
“I’m considering everything.”
“You’re sitting in your apartment considering everything. There’s a difference between considering and circling.” Marc’s voice dropped the agent register. “Have you talked to anyone? Not me. Someone who isn’t on retainer.”
“I don’t need to talk to anyone.”
“I know. That’s exactly what worries me.”
Patrick stood and walked to the window. The lake was a strip of gray between buildings.
“You’ll have an answer before the deadline,” Patrick said. “That’s what I can give you right now.”
Marc accepted it. They discussed a sponsorship renewal and a media request. Patrick listened and responded, his voice even, the answers automatic.
They hung up. The apartment was silent.
He still hadn’t signed, and the term was the only reason he’d given Marc. He hadn’t said the real one aloud to anyone, including himself.
While they were still talking, Asher’s texts had changed in tone over the past few days—the jokes and the riffs gone, short and gentle, like he’d decided Patrick was pulling away and was bracing himself for less. The one at noon was no different.
Good morning. Hope your day is okay.
Patrick knew the blame was his. He’d had the chance to be honest the night Asher raised the subject of the draft, and he’d brushed it off instead. The knowing sat heavy and low in him, and every time Asher’s name lit up his screen, it got heavier.
Morning. Day’s fine. How’s yours?
He read it back after he sent it and thought about leaving the next one on read instead. Asher deserved more than this. If he didn’t get out of his own head, Asher would stop trying.
His phone buzzed again.
Game tonight. Wish me luck.
Patrick typed back.
Good luck.
Then, because he couldn’t help himself:
I’ll be thinking about you.
A few minutes later, the phone rang, Asher’s name on the screen.
“Hey.” Asher’s voice came through bright, carrying the ambient noise of a parking lot. “Figured I’d call instead of texting for once. Radical concept.”
“Hey.”
“It’s a doubleheader tonight. Briggs is starting game one and his slider’s been filthy lately, guy’s locked in.
And I’m trying a new stance adjustment Delgado suggested—wider base, hands a little higher.
Feels weird in batting practice, but the ball’s jumping off the bat.
” He was talking fast, filling the space, and Patrick could hear the effort in it. “Anyway. What are you up to?”
“Not much. Trained this morning. Reading.”
“Reading what?”
“A book.”
The pause on the other end lasted three seconds. Three seconds of Asher holding the joke he wanted to make, letting it die because the jokes had stopped landing.
“Hey, listen.” The performance went out of his voice.
“We’re home this week. Come up. And before you say no, hear me out.
You don’t have to do anything. Sit in my crappy apartment, read your book, pretend I’m not there.
I just want you around for a few days. I know I’ve got no business asking—not after the way we left things last time, and maybe that’s me needing to take the hint.
But I couldn’t not ask, just in case it’s not only me losing my mind.
That week you were up here was good. It was good for me.
And I think it was good for you too, right up until I pushed you to talk about stuff you weren’t ready for.
I’m not going to do that again. No pushing, I swear.
I get it if you’re not there yet, and I can live with that.
” He let out a breath. “I just miss you. Come up. Like before.”
For a second, Patrick let himself feel how much he wanted it: a week of Asher being loud in the next room, every space filling up just because Asher was in it. Then he did what he’d done every day for a week.
“It’s not you,” he said before he could stop himself.
“That week was good. I want you to know that.” He made himself stop there because everything after it was the draft.
“But I can’t come up. Not this week. Marc’s down to the wire with the front office, and they could want me in a room on no notice.
And I wouldn’t be good company right now. You’d get the worst version of me.”
The contract was real, but it wasn’t the reason, and they both knew it. Asher didn’t call him on it. He’d quit doing that days ago, and Patrick hated that he’d taught him to.
“Okay,” Asher said. “I miss you. I know I keep saying that and you keep not knowing what to do with it, but I’m going to keep saying it because it’s true.”
Patrick closed his eyes. He’d drifted to the window without deciding to, the strip of lake bright between the buildings now.
“I miss you too,” he said, and it was true, the truest thing he’d said in days. He left it there with nothing after it, and Asher took it and didn’t ask for more.
“Okay,” Asher said. “I’ll text you after the game.”
“Yeah. Good luck tonight.”
“You said that already.”
“I know.”
They hung up. Patrick gripped the windowsill, knuckles white.
He went to the gym because the apartment had turned airless and he couldn’t afford to get distracted when he was lifting.
The weight room was empty. He got under the bar, and for a rep or two, there was relief in it—the bar didn’t care about the draft, or Asher, or the fact that he hadn’t slept in days.
It didn’t last. By the third set the quiet was gone, and everything he’d come to outrun was back. He kept lifting anyway. Lifting badly was still better than going home to sit alone with it.
The door opened behind him. Dev came in with his bag over one shoulder, already dressed to train, and lifted his chin at Patrick in the mirror.
“Pruitt said you’ve been in here every day,” Dev said. He dropped his bag. “Alone. I told him that was just you.”
Patrick wiped the bar with his towel. “Not all of us let ourselves go just because we’re off the ice.”
Dev huffed and didn’t push. He sat on the bench against the wall, water bottle between his hands, and let the quiet sit. He wasn’t pushing, but the eyebrow he raised in the mirror said he wasn’t buying it.
Patrick loaded plates for the next set. The clang of iron echoed through the empty room.
“You’ve got something going on,” Dev said. Not a question, not an accusation. He said it to the middle distance, sparing them both the eye contact, which was his habit with anything that mattered. “I don’t need to know what. But if you wanna talk, I’m here, man.”
Patrick racked the bar. Everything in him said to finish the workout in silence and drive home. He stood there with his hands on the cold steel and didn’t.
“There’s someone I’d stay for,” he said.
The words came out flat and strange. He’d never said any of it aloud, not to anyone. Dev didn’t look surprised by the someone. He’d clocked that a while ago. The staying was the part that landed.
“And the draft might put me two thousand miles from here,” Patrick went on because the door was open now and the rest came easier than he’d expected.
“And I can stop it. The day my name started landing on the speculation lists, I had Marc start on a new deal. Longer term, a no-move clause, a discount big enough that the front office comes out ahead. It’s been on the table for weeks.
” He looked at the loaded bar instead of at Dev. “I haven’t signed it.”
“Why not?” No edge on it. Something gentler than curiosity.
“Because I can’t tell whether I want this because I can’t imagine playing anywhere but here, or because of him. And I’m not stupid. Cutting my own salary for something this new is asking for it to blow up in my face.” Patrick stopped. “I’ve spent my whole life not needing anything I couldn’t keep.”
Dev was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, he didn’t argue, didn’t call Patrick a coward, didn’t reach for the cheap reassurance.
“That’s the real question then,” he said.
“For you, or for him.” He turned the water bottle in his hands and asked it like he was asking it of himself too.
“I’ll tell you what I think, and it might be worth nothing.
Guys like us get so good at not needing anybody that we lose the thread on what we actually want.
The not-wanting stops being armor and turns into the whole personality.
” A small motion at the corner of his mouth, aimed inward.
“It’s easier to ask whether you want Chicago for the right reasons than to admit you’re scared to want it at all. ”
Patrick looked at him. “Guys like us.”
Dev kept his eyes on the middle distance. He drank from the water bottle and didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.
“Anyway.” Dev stood and crossed to the rack and started loading his own bar. “I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’ve been ignoring a text since this morning because answering it means something.” He set his feet under the bar. “Figure out the want, Fonty. The need sorts itself out.”
They trained for another hour without speaking.
Patrick drove home in the late afternoon. He parked in the garage and sat in the car with the engine off.
For you, or for him.
He didn’t have an answer. What he had was a week of handing Asher less and less, hating himself for it, and doing it again the next day anyway.
He could see exactly what he was doing—getting out ahead of a loss that hadn’t happened yet, pulling back so it couldn’t gut him later—and seeing it clearly hadn’t stopped him once.
He went upstairs. He’d barely dropped his keys when the phone buzzed.
Won 6-2. Went 3 for 4. Thought you’d want to know.
Pride and guilt landed together. He started to type the safe version—That’s incredible. I’m proud of you. True, small, a door he could shut before anything got through it.
His thumb stopped over the screen.
This was the move. Every day this week, the same one: send the most mundane text he could get away with, then retreat.
It hadn’t protected Asher from anything.
It had left him alone on the other end, guessing.
Texting was how Patrick hid, and Dev had told him to figure out the want, and he knew the want.
He’d known it for months. It was three for four tonight, texting him about it.
He deleted the half-typed message. Then, before he could talk himself out of it, he called.
It rang once. Twice.
“Hey.” Asher picked up, wary, the way he’d answered all week. “Everything okay?”
“No,” Patrick said. “Not really. I’ve been doing this all wrong, and I don’t want to do it over text. Can we talk?”