Chapter 18
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Asher dropped into his crouch in the bottom of the first under more lights than any minor-league park he’d played in had ever had.
His pulse slammed hard enough that he felt it in his ears.
Nine innings of a big-league game ahead of him.
He’d waited his whole life for exactly this and dreamed it in detail.
The real thing was louder and faster than any of the dreams.
He’d reported to Milwaukee that morning.
A clubhouse three times the size of any he’d ever dressed in, his name over a stall, a jersey on the hanger with TUCKER across the back in the same colors his dad had worn for eleven years.
The manager pulled him in and told him he was catching that night.
Navarro was out for surgery, and their backup needed a rest day, and the book on Asher said he could.
Four years of being potential instead of a player, and it came down to another man’s bad luck and one sentence across a desk. You’re in there tonight, kid. Breathe.
He couldn’t.
The first inning was pure adrenaline and muscle memory, and the whole time, some part of him kept waiting for someone to notice he didn’t belong there.
By the third, it had slowed into something he knew, the work he’d done his whole life, reading a hitter’s hands and trusting the sequence, except now the hitters were the best in the world and the room for a bad call was the width of a seam.
His dads were behind the dugout. He’d known where they were before he took the field, the way you know where the sun is.
Pops on his feet half the night, loud enough that Asher could find his voice in forty thousand.
Dad next to him, quieter, watching his kid crouch in the uniform he used to wear, with a look Asher couldn’t hold for more than a second without losing the next pitch.
He was so deep in all of it—the sequencing, the hitters, his fathers in the seats—that he didn’t see Patrick until the fifth.
It came between batters. Asher was down, flashing signs, doing the automatic scan of the stands he did every half-inning, and his eyes snagged on a man in the lower boxes off third base.
Dark shirt, plain cap pulled low, forearms braced on his knees in that exact attentive stillness Asher would know anywhere. His hands went quiet inside the mitt.
Patrick had said he’d be there, but part of Asher had been waiting for him to back out.
Patrick had been saying things for a week and then going silent behind them, and some stubborn part of Asher hadn’t let himself believe this one until it was right in front of his eyes.
Patrick Fontaine, in a major-league ballpark, sitting in a crowd he’d have driven a long way to avoid, watching Asher work the biggest night of his life.
The hitter stepped in. Asher dropped his eyes, put down a sign, and caught the rest of the way with his eyes nailed to the plate and his whole future sitting in two different sections of the same stadium.
The Mavericks won it. He went one for three with a walk, didn’t miss a pitch he was supposed to catch, and when the final out folded into his glove, the sound that came down on the field was the loudest thing he’d ever stood inside.
The clubhouse made a thing of it. Guys he’d known for six hours came by his stall to shake his hand, and somebody pressed the game ball into his hand before he’d even gotten out of his gear.
His phone lit up faster than he could read it, and he shoved it in his bag without looking.
His dads were waiting down the tunnel. Pops got there first and crushed the breath out of him, holding on past the point of comfortable.
Dad took the back of his neck in one hand, pulled him in until their foreheads nearly touched, and said, low and rough, “I’ve watched you play a thousand games. That was the best one.” Then he let go.
The next while blurred together, too loud and too fast to feel real yet.
He didn’t check his phone until the clubhouse had thinned out. One message sat above the rest.
I’ll be by my car when your night’s done. No rush. I’m not going anywhere.
He told his dads he’d see them at home, that there was something he had to do first, and Pops gave him a look that said he knew more than he was letting on and let him go. He showered fast, pulled on jeans and a T-shirt, and went out a side door into the players’ lot.
It was emptying now, most of the cars gone, the big light towers shutting down in sequence.
The night air still held the day’s heat.
Bugs circled the poles. Patrick’s car was parked at the far edge under a light that had burned out, and he was leaning against the driver-side door with his arms crossed and the cap still on.
When Asher came around the corner of the building, Patrick straightened.
Asher stopped short. His legs were already angled half a step toward the corner of the building he’d just come around, the old pull to leave before the conversation could start.
He went toward Patrick instead. Crossed the lot, stopped three feet away, dropped his bag, and looked at him. Up close, the stress showed in the shadows under his eyes. But his gaze was direct, more open than Asher had seen it since May.
For a second, neither of them said anything.
“You came,” Asher said, and it came out rougher than he meant it to.
Patrick looked at him a long moment before he answered, like he was deciding how much to let show. “Told you I would.”
“You hate crowds. There were forty thousand people in there tonight, and you sat through every one of them.”
Something moved behind Patrick’s eyes, there and gone. “I wore the hat.” His voice wasn’t as level as he wanted it to sound. A beat. “Some things are more important than my own comfort.”
“You bought a Mavericks hat.” Asher’s voice came out steadier than he felt.
“If I was going to show up, I wanted it clear who I was supporting.” Patrick uncrossed his arms. The motion looked like it cost him. He looked at Asher, open in a way Asher felt on his skin.
Patrick opened his mouth, closed it, and tried again. “I shut you out. I know I did.” A beat. “I told myself I needed an answer on the draft before I said anything, that staying quiet was protecting you instead of just being easier for me. That’s not an excuse. It’s just what was in my head.”
Asher waited. Somewhere behind them, a car started and pulled away. Every word was costing Patrick something to get out, and Asher wasn’t going to rush him through it.
“The draft’s in three days,” Patrick said.
“I signed an extension with a no-move clause. Gave up years and a couple million to get it. Chicago can’t leave me exposed—not to the Zia Suns, not to anyone.
I’m staying.” He said it without inflection, facts arranged in sequence.
Then the precision cracked. “And I was sitting in my apartment this morning with all of that already decided, and none of it mattered because I couldn’t do another day of being smart about you. ”
“Being smart.”
“Being safe. Being controlled. Being the version of myself that doesn’t need anyone.
” A muscle ticked in his jaw. “I’m good at that version.
I’ve been that version for twenty-eight years.
It works. It’s efficient. It kept me alive through every trade, every roster cut, every time someone decided I wasn’t worth protecting. And it almost cost me you.”
Patrick stopped. His hand came up, hesitated in the space between them, and came to rest on Asher’s forearm, uncertain, like he half expected to be shrugged off. Asher had never seen him touch him like that before.
“I don’t know how to do this.” His voice had gone low, all the polish stripped out of it. “I don’t know how to be someone’s, not really. But I’d rather figure that out with you than keep being good at being alone.”
The last of the stadium lights went dark. Patrick stood in front of him with his hand still resting on Asher’s arm and nothing held back in his face, his words hanging in the air. Asher felt a joke rising in his throat, the automatic reflex to make it easier by making it funny.
The charm, the ability to walk into any room and have everyone love you and still go home alone because you left before anyone could leave you first—that’s mine. I gave you that.
It was Pops’s voice. It never really went away.
Asher let the joke die. He stood under the dead lot lights and stayed quiet, arms loose at his sides, and let Patrick’s words reach him.
“I don’t know how to be the person someone stays for.” His voice was rough, the words honest and raw. “Every person I’ve been with has left. I know I’m the common denominator. And for the last week, I’ve been waiting for you to finish leaving because that’s what I know how to do.”
Patrick’s hand dropped from Asher’s arm. His fingers opened at his sides.
“But you’re here.” Asher’s breath caught. He pressed through it. “And every instinct I’ve got is telling me to make this into a joke or start walking because that’s what I’ve always done in the past. I’m choosing something different. Aloud, so you can hold me to it. I’m staying.”
Patrick closed the distance. Three feet collapsed into inches, and his hands came up to Asher’s face, both of them, palms against his jaw, thumbs at his cheekbones, and held him. The contact was firm and careful, and something behind Asher’s ribs cracked open.
“You’re not the common denominator,” Patrick said, low and close. “You’re the variable I couldn’t solve for. That’s different.”
A sound broke out of Asher, half laugh, half something rawer, and he didn’t try to sort out which.
He put his hands on Patrick’s waist and pulled him in.
The kiss wasn’t careful. Weeks of silence and careful texts and willed distance broke under it, hard enough that Asher tasted salt on Patrick’s mouth and the want he’d been rationing for a month.