Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Yeah,” Asher said. “Of course we can talk. I’m here.”
The flat, careful voice from the texts was gone. This was Patrick’s real one, rough at the edges.
For a second, there was only him breathing.
“This week’s been bad,” Patrick said. “And I made it your problem, and I knew I was doing it the whole time. You didn’t do anything. I need you to hear that first. None of it is you.”
The knot Asher had carried all week loosened.
“Thank you,” he said, quieter. “That helps. That helps a lot.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know.” And he did. He could hear it. “Patrick, what’s going on?
Talk to me. Whatever it is, I’m not going anywhere.
Let me—” He made himself slow down. “You don’t have to carry it by yourself.
I know we’ve never put a name on whatever this is, but I’m not just here for the sex, Patrick.
I want the bad weeks too, not only the good ones. ”
Patrick went quiet. A week of his flat, closed-up quiet had taught Asher to brace for impact—but this was Patrick gathering himself for something, so Asher shut his mouth and let him.
“It’s the expansion draft,” Patrick said finally. “And some stuff under the draft I haven’t figured out how to say yet. I will. I’m trying to get there.” A breath. “I’m not good at this. At letting someone in while it’s still happening.”
“I don’t want some sanitized version of your life.”
“I know you don’t. That’s the part that scares me.”
Asher pressed his eyes shut. There it was—Patrick close enough to touch and still holding something back, like talking to him through a window. Asher could see him clear as day. He just couldn’t get a hand on him.
“Then answer me one thing,” Asher said. “Are we okay? You and me. Not the draft, not the rest of it. Just us.”
“Yeah.” For the first time all week, Patrick didn’t sound like he was managing it. “We’re okay. I know I’ve done a horrible job showing it, but I think I started missing you before I even got back as far as Milwaukee.”
Asher laughed, wet and surprised. “Okay. God, you’re a lot of work.”
“I know.”
“I mean it as devotion.” He did, too, more than he could say without his voice giving him away.
There was a sound on the other end that might have been the start of a laugh. It was the best thing Asher had heard in days.
They stayed on the line a while longer, drifting into easier things—the doubleheader, Briggs’s slider, the kid in Cedar Rapids who couldn’t lay off a changeup. Patrick loosened the longer they talked. By the time they hung up, Asher felt better than he had since the morning Patrick left.
The slider came in backdoor at seventy-eight miles an hour, and the batter froze. Asher held the glove where it was, low and away, the leather framing the pitch at the edge of the zone. The umpire’s fist punched up for strike three.
He tossed the ball back to Briggs and dropped into the next sign sequence without acknowledging the strikeout.
Third out, fifth inning, a two-run lead that felt as thin as the margin had been all week.
He jogged toward the dugout, stripping off his chest protector on the move, grabbed his bat from the rack.
“That changeup in the third was nasty,” said Gutierrez from the far end of the bench. “You had Ramirez guessing all night.”
“He was sitting fastball. I gave him off-speed.” Asher pulled his batting gloves tight. “Not complicated.”
He singled up the middle in the fifth and stood on the bag barely feeling it. That was the tell lately. Baseball used to empty his head clean—read the hitter, put down the sign, do the work. Now, he’d call a good game and walk off and find everything exactly where he’d left it.
After, he sat against the clubhouse wall with ice taped to his knee, the ache so familiar he’d quit noticing it.
The trainer had said ice and anti-inflammatories.
Asher had said okay and let it go. The room did its postgame thing around him—music up, Gutierrez narrating a diving play, the rookie still glowing off his first save.
A month ago, he’d have been in the middle of it, loudest guy in the room, the bit so smooth nobody saw it for one.
Tonight, he didn’t have it in him. He could fake it, or he could think. Not both.
His phone was in his locker. He didn’t check it.
Things were better now, mostly. Patrick texted back like himself, picked up when Asher called, dropped the flat careful act the week had been.
But every time Asher nudged toward the draft, or toward whatever had Patrick up at night, Patrick slid them somewhere warmer, so smoothly that Asher would be two topics past it before he noticed he’d been handled.
The door was open again. A crack of it, but Patrick’s shoulder was against the rest.
They hadn’t broken up. They were good, even, and that was the hell of it—nothing to point at, nothing to fix, just the man he was falling for holding him off with a smile, so nice about it that quitting would’ve been the easy thing.
And there was always the out. If the call to Milwaukee ever came, he could climb into the life he’d wanted since he was a kid and let himself believe Patrick drifted first. Nobody could prove otherwise. He’d leave clean, the way he always left, and call it timing instead of fear.
He showered, dressed, picked up his phone.
One message from Patrick, sent before the game.
Busy day. Hope tonight goes well.
Easy and warm, the way the texts hadn’t been a week ago. Asher typed back without overthinking it.
Won again. 3 for 4. Knee’s barking, but I’ll live. Call you tonight?
Patrick’s reply was waiting by the time he got home.
Long day, about to crash. Tomorrow, I promise.
Tomorrow. Asher read it twice. Probably nothing—Patrick was tired, people got tired. But some part of him heard the old retreat in it, the door easing back toward the jamb, and he set the phone face-down so he’d quit reading it that way.
He went to bed. The far side was empty, the way it always was when Patrick was hours south. Tonight, Asher felt it anyway. Not the sex, or not just that. He just missed him, plain and all the way down.
Patrick had been in this bed three or four times, enough to leave an impression his body recalled without permission: how he slept on his back with one arm across his chest, controlled even in unconsciousness.
How his breathing changed in the minutes before sleep, the steady rhythm breaking into something slower and less guarded.
The weight of his hand settling on Asher’s hip at three in the morning without waking.
Asher rolled over and pressed his face into the pillow.
The cotton smelled like his own laundry detergent and nothing else.
For a brief window, there had been the trace of whatever Patrick used after he shaved, clean with something resinous underneath, a scent Asher had first caught pressed against the hinge of Patrick’s jaw.
He wanted to call and ask what they were doing. But he knew how it would go. A good call, an easy one, Patrick warm right until Asher pushed at anything real, then a smooth turn to some other subject Asher wouldn’t have the heart to fight. He’d hang up feeling better and no closer to anything.
So he didn’t call. He lay in the dark, the empty half of the bed right there beside him, and ran the loop he’d been running all week.
None of it was his to fix. Not the draft, not Patrick holding him at the door, not the chickenshit part of him that kept eyeing Milwaukee like an exit.
Give him a runner on third and a hitter who couldn’t lay off the slider, and he’d know exactly what to do.
This, he had nothing for. No idea how to get Patrick to let him all the way in, and even less how to keep from bolting before he did.
Pops called, and Asher had the phone to his ear by the second ring.
He never picked up on the second ring when things were fine.
When things were fine, he called Pops. He called during car rides, between innings, and from grocery store parking lots because talking to Pops was the easiest thing he did, the relationship that required no performance.
When things were fine, Asher called first and talked too much, and Pops listened and laughed and gave it to him straight at the end, the way he always did.
When things weren’t fine, Asher went silent. And Pops recognized the silence and picked up the phone.
“Hey, kid.”
“Hey, Pops.” Asher tried to put something light in it and heard himself miss by a mile.
The pause that came back was the kind Pops used when he’d already heard everything he needed to. “That bad.”
“It’s nothing. Long stretch.”
“You’ve gone quiet on me. You don’t go quiet. You once called me from a gas station to wax poetic about a sandwich.”
“It was a really good sandwich.”
“It was a gas-station sandwich.”
A laugh got out before Asher could stop it, thin and not quite steady.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s been a week.”
Pops didn’t rush him. Asher could hear the background sounds of the Milwaukee house, the faint hum of the kitchen, a television in another room.
Asher dragged a hand down his face. “It’s Patrick,” he said.
“The expansion draft. There’s a real chance he’ll get pulled out of Chicago and shipped halfway across the country, and instead of talking to me about what’s going on, he’s backing off.
Going quiet. Getting a jump on losing me before it’s even happened.
” His jaw set. “And it’s not even decided, Pops.
That’s what’s killing me. He’s pulling away over a maybe, and he won’t let me help him carry any of it. ”
The line went still a second.
“You know,” Pops said, “I almost threw the whole thing away with your dad. Long before you were ever a thought.”
Asher blinked. “What?”
“I had the best thing that ever happened to me, and I damn near set it on fire. The part that should scare you is that I’d have called it the smart move the whole time I did it.”
“Pops—”