Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The best news of Asher’s life came in at a dead sprint, no hello, no breath, just his voice cracking down the middle the second Patrick picked up.
After a week of bracing for the worst, Patrick wasn’t ready for the best—not Asher’s, not delivered like this, not crashing into the gray middle of his afternoon.
“I got the call! Navarro’s going in for surgery, and I have to report tomorrow.” A ragged, disbelieving laugh. “Patrick, I’m going to the show.”
For one clean second, it was easy. The whole grinding week fell away, and Patrick was glad, all the way through.
“Asher.” His voice cracked on it, and he let it. “You did it. You actually did it.” He was on his feet without deciding to, grinning at the empty apartment. “You’ve earned this since before I knew you. They’re getting the best catcher in that whole system, and they don’t even know it yet.”
“I keep waiting for someone to call back and say it’s a mistake.”
“It’s not a mistake.” He said it hard, like he could make it true by saying it. “They’re lucky to get you, and I need you to actually hear that.”
Being happy for Asher was the easiest thing he’d done in a week. That part he could do with his whole chest.
It was the next part that he failed.
“Come up,” Asher said. “First game’s tomorrow. Come watch me do this.”
Patrick felt himself pull back before he could stop it. The game was three days before the draft, and he couldn’t promise Asher a future he wasn’t sure he had.
“Let me look at the schedule,” he said.
The brightness in Asher’s voice dropped a notch. “Yeah. Okay. Look at the schedule.”
They talked another minute, smaller than before, and hung up.
Patrick set the phone down in the silent apartment.
Asher had called him with the best news of his life, and Patrick had handed him a maybe and listened to the joy leave him in real time.
All week, he’d told himself that pulling back a little at a time was the merciful version, a slow loss instead of a sudden one.
There was nothing merciful in the sound Asher’s voice had just made.
He didn’t sleep. By the time the windows went gray, he couldn’t stand the apartment, so he went to the gym—not for the workout, but because it was the one room where his body knew what to do without him.
The door opened. Dev came in with two coffees. Dev came to the gym with a bag and a water bottle, never coffee. Two paper cups meant something was coming.
“Figured you’d be here,” Dev said. He held out a cup.
Patrick took it. “You brought me coffee.”
“I brought us coffee. You’re a beneficiary of the fact that I passed a place on the way.” Dev sat on the bench against the wall and stretched his legs out.
They drank in silence for a few minutes.
“Lindy texted me this morning,” Dev said.
Patrick glanced at him.
“Yeah.” Dev turned the coffee cup between his hands. “He asked if I wanted to get dinner. Normal thing. Teammates getting dinner.” He took a sip. “I’ve been staring at the text for three hours.”
Patrick knew better than to think it was just a simple text.
The only question now was what Patrick was supposed to do about his teammate opening up to him.
This was Dev handing him something real and trusting him not to drop it.
Patrick had spent years convinced he was the only one in any room he walked into. He wasn’t. He never had been.
“Three hours. I wrote four different responses, deleted all of them, put my phone in a drawer, took it out of the drawer, and drove here.” Dev’s mouth moved, an inward expression, a man examining his own machinery.
“It’s dinner. With a person I eat dinner with regularly.
And I’ve turned it into a strategic operation because if I say yes in the wrong way, he might hear something I’m not ready for him to hear, and if I say no, I spend the night in my apartment wishing I’d said yes. ”
“Why are you telling me this?” Patrick asked.
Dev looked at him. The gaze was direct and patient, stripped of deflection.
“Because I’m about to give you advice I can’t follow myself, and I need you to take it seriously even though the source is compromised.” He set the coffee down. “You look like shit, Fonty.”
“Thanks.”
“You look like a man who’s been sleeping four hours a night and spending the other twenty convincing himself that the thing he wants is the thing he should be afraid of. I know what that looks like because I see it every morning.” He tapped his own chest. “Right here.”
Patrick leaned against the squat rack.
“The draft is in three days,” he said.
“I know when the draft is. I just don’t know what happens after.”
“Nobody knows what happens after. That’s what after means.
” Dev picked up the coffee again. “Here’s what I know.
I know you had something. I know it was real because I watched you change, and you are not a man who changes for anything less than real.
And I know you’ve spent the last week treating that something like a liability instead of—” He stopped, searched for the word. “The reason.”
“The reason for what?”
“For any of it. Chicago, hockey, the apartment you go home to. What’s the point of fighting to stay if you’ve already emptied out everything worth staying for?”
Dev stood up, collected his coffee, and looked at Patrick with an expression that had shed every layer of compartmentalization. Tired. Clear-eyed.
“Call him back,” Dev said. “Or get in your car and drive up there. I don’t care which. But stop doing this.” He gestured at the gym, the empty room, the loaded bar. “This isn’t discipline, and we both know it.”
He left.
Patrick stood in the empty weight room with the loaded bar in front of him and didn’t put another set on it.
Dev had walked in carrying two coffees and his own unanswered text and said the thing Patrick had been working not to hear: the discipline had stopped being discipline a while ago.
He’d known it since the morning the first squat refused to move. He’d just needed it said aloud.
He drove home. Sat in the car with the engine off and his hands on the wheel.
What’s the point of fighting to stay if you’ve already emptied out everything worth staying for?
Dev had asked him, days back, whether he wanted Chicago for himself or for Asher, and Patrick had treated not knowing as permission to do nothing.
He knew now. Chicago was the first place that had ever been his, not assigned by a draft, not survived, not endured.
He wanted to keep it whether or not he and Asher lasted the season.
And he wanted Asher too. Wanting both didn’t make either one a weakness. That part he was still getting used to.
He sat on the couch. The lake was visible through the window, a strip of blue between buildings.
He was done. Done fighting this, done treating the best thing in his life like a variable to be controlled, done with the silence and the measured texts and the four-hour sleep and the two-hundred-seventy-five-pound squat that wouldn’t move because his body had known for weeks what he hadn’t let himself: the problem was never the bar.
The expansion draft was in four days. The uncertainty hadn’t resolved. Nothing external had changed.
What changed was this: he stopped requiring the answers before he moved.
It was the inverse of how he’d done everything else.
He’d spent his life refusing to commit until the path was clear, gathering information, modeling outcomes, certain it was wisdom.
If he never fully showed up, he could never be left, and he’d gotten very good at not showing up.
It had kept him safe, and it had kept him alone, and he was through with both.
He picked up his phone and called Marc.
It rang twice. “Patrick.”
“Take the deal,” Patrick said. “Three years, the no-move. If you can pull a fourth out of them, do it, but don’t let the term be the thing that runs us past the list. Get it signed before the deadline.”
A pause. Marc’s chair creaked. “Last week you wanted five years and a fight.”
“Last week I was looking for a reason to stall. Three years and the no-move keeps me in Chicago. That’s the only part I actually care about.”
“You understand what you’re handing them. A discount and a short leash, gift-wrapped.” Marc’s voice shifted. “You’re sure.”
“I’m sure.”
Marc was quiet a moment, and when he spoke again, the salesman had gone out of his voice. What was left underneath was tired.
“I have to say one thing as your agent, then I’ll make the call. The smart move is the other one. You let the list come out, you let the Suns build a franchise around you, you bank the term and the money while you’ve got the leverage. That’s the advice I’d give any client who asked me cold.”
“I’m not asking you cold.”
“No. You’re not.” A breath. “You have never once asked me to make you richer. You asked me to keep you somewhere. So I’ll call Ostrowski, and I’ll make your no-move the easiest yes they give all week, and I’ll back it the whole way. Not because it’s the smart play. Because it’s yours.”
“Thank you, Marc.”
“Don’t thank me. I’m going to go argue with myself about your money the rest of the afternoon.” The line warmed by a degree. “Go do whatever it is you’re about to go do.”
Patrick hung up. Once the deal was signed, it was settled: a no-move clause forced Chicago to protect him, which put him out of the Suns’ reach. It put the decision out of his own reach too. He couldn’t talk himself back out of it now, and that was exactly why he’d done it.
He waited to feel the loss of it, the years, the money he’d just signed away, and it didn’t come. What came instead was quiet. He’d done what he’d spent his life refusing to do: wanting something aloud, where it could be taken from him, and reaching for it anyway.
That left the other part.
He opened his browser. He didn’t search the Fireflies. Asher wasn’t a Firefly anymore. He searched the Milwaukee Mavericks, and the home schedule came up, and there it was. A home game tonight.
He looked at it for a long time. The screen dimmed, and he touched it awake.
Tonight, in Milwaukee, Asher would crouch behind a major-league plate for the first time, in the uniform of the club his father had pitched for, and do the thing he’d been chasing his entire life.
There was no version of his own life Patrick could stand to live in where he wasn’t in the stands to watch it.
He didn’t have a plan past being there, which was new by itself.
No script, no contingency, no idea what he’d say when he got there.
He only knew he was done holding Asher at arm’s length, that Asher had spent the worst week of it reaching for him and getting nothing back, and that the least he could do was close the gap in person, somewhere Asher could watch his face while he said it.
He went to the bedroom, pulled a shirt off a hanger, grabbed his keys, and caught himself halfway to the door.
First pitch was hours off, and the last thing Asher needed before his first big-league start was Patrick turning up at the clubhouse with everything still unsaid, pulling his head out of the game.
He made himself set the keys down. He’d time the drive to get there for the game, take a seat, and let Asher work.
He’d find him after. He’d find the words on the way.
He stopped in the entryway. He’d kept his life bare enough to walk out at a moment’s notice for as long as he could remember, and he didn’t want to be able to walk out anymore.
He opened his phone and found Asher’s thread.
Patrick typed. Stared at it. Didn’t delete it.
I’ll be there.
He hit send before he could talk himself out of it, and made himself not read it back.
He set the phone on the counter. His hands were steady. His pulse wasn’t.
The typing dots appeared, and Patrick watched them and waited.
The dots disappeared, then returned.
At the game?
Patrick typed back.
Yes, the game. I’m sorry if I made it seem like I didn’t care. I’ve been self-absorbed in my own shit this week, but I wouldn’t miss this for anything. Can we talk after?
The answer came in three seconds.
I’ll leave your name at the gate.
Patrick read it twice. In a few hours, he’d point the car north and walk into a ballpark full of strangers to watch Asher do the thing he’d chased his whole life. He couldn’t wait, which was new too.