Chapter 19 #2
“Right after you kissed me. And again that night in the kitchen, and most days since, somewhere you couldn’t hear it.” Patrick turned his head and looked at him. “I couldn’t say it in a language you understood. So I said it in mine.”
Asher’s hand pressed flat on his chest, over his heart.
“Say it again,” he said.
“Je suis foutu.”
“Still?”
“Worse.”
They lay there. The morning moved forward without them.
Asher’s phone lit up on the nightstand. He reached for it, read the screen, and laughed.
“Pops,” he said. “Third text this morning. He wants to know if I’m bringing you to dinner tomorrow or if he has to drive downtown and pry you out of a hotel himself.”
Patrick went still. “He knows I’m here.”
“Patrick, my dads have known about you since roughly January. I told Pops the real version on the phone a week ago, and he said, and he laughed because I actually thought I’d kept it a secret from him.
” Asher set the phone down and looked at him, the grin gone soft.
“They want to meet you. Tomorrow, after the day game. Dad’s already talking about the brisket and pretending he isn’t nervous, which, according to Pops, he is. ”
The old reflex moved in Patrick before he could stop it, the urge to find a reason not to go. Meeting the parents was a door, and doors were what he’d spent his life keeping shut. He acknowledged the reflex, and then he let it go.
“Okay,” he said.
Patrick went back for the night game and sat in the same section, cap low.
Asher threw out a runner trying to steal second in the seventh, and Patrick was on his feet before he’d decided to stand.
The next day’s game was an afternoon one, done before dinner, and when Asher came out of the players’ lot with wet hair and his bag over his shoulder, he held out his hand for Patrick’s keys.
The house sat on a quiet street south of the city, an old brick place with a deep porch and a backyard that had clearly hosted a lot of catch.
Patrick read up on Sean Tucker from the passenger seat on the way over—eleven years a Maverick, an All-Star, the first openly gay pitcher in the league, outed only when Mason retired at a press conference without warning him, and he’d stayed in the game anyway.
Mason Atley he knew already, the way everyone did.
The loud one, the funny one, the retired outfielder who said the quiet parts aloud on national television.
Mason got to the door first. He was shorter than Patrick expected and took up twice the space, and he looked Patrick up and down with open, delighted appraisal.
“Oh,” Mason said. “He’s tall. Ash, you didn’t say he was tall.” He stuck out a hand and gripped Patrick’s hard. “Mason. Or you can call me Pops; most of Asher’s friends do. Come in before the brisket files a complaint.”
Sean was at the grill out back, and he was nothing like Mason: big, still, unhurried, someone who didn’t perform. He set down the tongs and shook Patrick’s hand and held it a beat, his pale eyes—the same translucent blue that showed up in every photo Patrick had scrolled past—taking him in.
“Patrick,” Sean said. “Glad you came.”
“Thank you for having me.”
“You play for the Syndicate.”
“I do.”
“Top four. Penalty kill. You don’t put up points, but nobody moves the puck when you’re on the ice.” Sean said it flatly, like he was reciting a scouting report he’d actually pulled. “You’re up for the expansion draft.”
Surprise caught him flat-footed. “You looked me up.”
“My kid’s gone on you. Of course I looked you up.”
“Then the report’s out of date,” Patrick said. “I signed an extension this week. There’s a no-move clause in it. They can’t leave me in the draft. I’m staying in Chicago.”
Sean nodded once. “Good.”
Dinner was loud, which was Mason’s doing, and good, which was Sean’s.
Mason told stories with his whole body and roasted Asher with a parent’s practiced cruelty, affection built right into the delivery, and Asher gave it right back.
Patrick sat in the middle of it and felt something he’d kept at arm’s length for a decade settle over him: everyone talking over each other because they all needed to be heard at once.
It was Sean who got him alone after. He didn’t engineer it. He was just on the porch with two beers when Patrick stepped out for air, and he handed him one without asking.
They stood a while. Down in the yard, Mason had Asher cornered about something, both of them laughing.
Sean watched them, in no hurry to talk. Patrick’s grip on the porch rail loosened. He hadn’t expected that, an easy quiet with a man he’d met an hour ago.
“He tells me things,” Sean said, eventually. “Always has.”
Patrick turned that over. “How much did he tell you?”
“Enough to know you went quiet on him.” Sean’s eyes stayed on his son. “Enough to know you showed up anyway.”
Patrick looked out at the yard and drank his beer.
“I’m not going to tell you nothing bad’s ever going to happen to you two,” Sean said. “Trades happen. Careers end. Nobody gets a guarantee on any of it.”
Patrick nodded. There was nothing in it to argue with.
“But I’ll tell you what I know, since you didn’t ask and I’m going to say it anyway.
” Sean turned the bottle in his hand. “I spent most of my career in a different city from the man down there in my yard. Different teams, schedules that fought each other eight months out of twelve. The one season we hid it was the hardest of my life, and you two get to skip that part, thank God—but the rest of it, the distance, the calendars, the version of your life where the person you most want to come home to is in another city, that part I know cold.”
Patrick made himself hold still and listen.
“People act like distance is what kills it. It isn’t.
” Sean shrugged, a small, economical motion.
“Silence is what kills it. Distance you can work around: you drive, you fly, you learn each other’s schedules, you make the days you don’t miss count double.
What you can’t work around is one of you going quiet and making the other one guess. ”
Patrick’s throat was tight. “And if it’s not Chicago someday. If some future trade sends me to the other end of the country instead of down the road.”
“Then it’s harder. Longer drives, worse flights, more of him you miss.
” Sean finally looked at him, and the pale eyes were steady and kind.
“And you’re talking like you’re the only one who can get moved.
He’s on a big-league roster now. They could trade him next summer to a city you’ve never flown to.
Baseball’s no more sentimental than hockey.
Nobody gets a guarantee, not you, not him, not me and Mason.
What you get to choose is whether you talk to him when things get hard, or whether you go sit alone in an apartment and let a week go by. ”
Below them, Mason finally let Asher go, and Asher looked up at the porch, found Patrick in the dark, and lifted a hand.
“You two haven’t said the words to each other yet,” Sean said it like a plain fact, not a question.
“But after twenty-four years with a man who’s always been good at showing me how much I mean to him, I know love when I’m standing next to it, whether anybody’s said it aloud or not.
” He clapped Patrick once on the shoulder, a heavy, settling weight.
“That’ll get you through whatever comes more than any contract will.
Just don’t go quiet on him again. That’s the only part that’s actually up to you. ”
He picked up his empty and went inside, and Patrick stood on the porch with a beer he hadn’t touched and the lake somewhere out past the trees.
For the first time in longer than he could count, the fear of losing something by wanting it loosened its grip.
Nothing about the future was certain. But Sean had lived a harder version of it, and he’d just told him it was survivable, and meant it.
Asher came up the porch steps a minute later, two at a time, and stopped in front of Patrick with the question already on his face—what did he say to you—and Patrick didn’t have the words for it yet, so he answered the other way.
He pulled Asher in by the back of the neck and held on, there on his boyfriend’s fathers’ porch, in plain view of anyone who cared to look, and didn’t let go.
“Good talk?” Asher asked into his shoulder.
“Your dad is terrifying.”
“He likes you. That’s him being warm.” Asher pulled back enough to see his face. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” Patrick said, and found that it was true. “Yeah. I’m okay.”
Through the kitchen window, Sean was at the sink with his back to them, giving them the porch a little longer.