Page 41 of Caught Offside

“You’re a snob, Fontaine.”

“I’m aware.”

Patrick handed him a mug, and it was, infuriatingly, the best coffee Asher had had in months. Far better than the swill he used to make. He leaned against the counter beside a man who’d packed his own coffee gear because it was his new obsession, and the thought came at him sideways, the kind he’d taught himself not to trust. I could have this. Not someday, but now, this summer, for real. Patrick was close enough to drive to on an off day. It was almost identical to the gap Asher’s dads had to overcome when they first got together. So it wasn’t a fantasy he had to talk himself out of. It was a real thing he could actually have—Patrick in a borrowed T-shirt in his kitchen, the most reachable thing Asher had ever let himself want.

He didn’t say any of it aloud. He let himself have the morning instead, and it was the best one he’d had in a long time.

That afternoon, before batting practice, Briggs leaned across the locker and turned his phone to face him.

“Isn’t this your buddy?”

The headline ran bold across the top.

Expansion Draft Watch: The Ten Players Most Likely to Land in Santa Fe

Patrick was under it in his Syndicate sweater, mid-shift, eyes down on a puck Asher couldn’t see. They had him ranked third. The paragraph beside the photo was the cold kind, all contract value and minutes and cap math, ending on a line about how hard the Syndicate would find it to protect him. Fontaine is viewed as more expendable than the offensive core. It was a hell of a word for a man who’d spent a whole season throwing his body in front of pucks so other guys could be the offensive core.

“That’s him,” Asher said and handed the phone back.

“He worried about it?”

“He hasn’t said.”

He kept it easy for Briggs, but the words landed wrong because they were true: Patrick hadn’t said. Until that headline got three inches from Asher’s face, he hadn’t known there was a draft to worry about at all, hadn’t known Patrick could be pulled out of Chicago and handed to a brand-new team by people he’d never met. He’d spent the best week he could remember with no idea it was coming.

Briggs gave him the look of a man who knew the difference between hasn’t said and hasn’t said to me. “Number three sounds like it’s a pretty good bet he’ll get picked up by the new team.”

It did. Asher took it into the cage and hit until his wrists ached, the ball ringing off the back netting like a fist on a wall, and it didn’t help because the problem wasn’t in his swing. It was that Patrick had known. You didn’t land at number three on a list like that overnight. He’d been carrying it the whole time and never let it show, and he’d let Asher go on believing the ground under them was solid. If Santa Fe drafted him, he’d be gone by fall, and the life Asher had spent all week letting himself want would go with him.

Asher tried that night. They’d turned the lights off and left the window open to the warm dark, and he lay there working up to it longer than he wanted to.

“That draft thing Briggs showed me today,” he said. “They had you at number three.”

Patrick didn’t move. “Mock lists. People make them all summer.”

“And if it’s not just a list. If they actually take you.”

“Then they take me.” Flat, even, giving nothing away. “Nothing I do between now and then changes it. No point spending one of these nights on it.”

It was a reasonable thing to say, and it was also a door, shut gently with Asher on the wrong side of it. He let it go because pushing Patrick had never once worked and because he didn’t want to lose the night either. But he filed it away. It was the one part of himself Patrick still wouldn’t let him near.

The last night of the homestand, neither of them moved off the couch.

Asher’s game had been that afternoon. Now it was late, and there was a different one on the TV that neither of them was watching. Patrick had his feet in Asher’s lap, and Asher had a hand loose around one ankle, his thumb tracking the bone with no say in the matter. In the morning, Asher left on a road trip, which meant Patrick had no reason to stay. He’d drive back to Chicago, and the two of them would go back to being a phone call after a game.

He’d spent the whole week not counting, and now he couldn’t stop. By tomorrow night, he’d be in a hotel in some other city, and Patrick would be alone in his apartment in Chicago. The week of waking up to someone, of reaching over in the dark and finding him there, would be over. And under all of it sat the draft, the thing he’d raised once and Patrick had brushed off, still between them and about to ride back to Chicago unspoken. He’d known the visit had an ending on it the whole time. He’d just managed to forget the bigger one sitting right behind it.

“You’re quiet,” Patrick said, which was rich, coming from him.

“I’m relaxed. There’s a difference. You wouldn’t know it.”

“I know it.” Patrick nudged him with a heel. “What?”

And there was the door, standing open. I saw the article. I know what it could mean. Talk to me about it. Tell me you’re scared, because I am. Asher had the words lined up and ready.

“Nothing,” he said. “Just don’t want you to go yet.”

He’d meant it as a joke. It hadn’t come out as one. Something moved across Patrick’s face, there and gone, the first thing Asher had seen on it all week that he didn’t like. Then Patrick reached down and laced their fingers together on his own shin, which was an answer, of a kind, just not the one Asher had asked for.