Page 43 of Caught Offside

Marc was quiet for a moment. “Don’t.”

“You take a percentage. Two million off the top is your money as much as mine.”

“Patrick. I’ve made a very good living off you for six years. Do not sit there and structure your career around protecting my commission. That’s not a reason, and we both know it.”

“It’s a reason. It’s not the only one.” Patrick watched a delivery truck turn onto the empty street below. “I’m not making a seven-figure decision before lunch on a Tuesday.”

It was a stall, and they both knew it.

The deal wasn’t the hard part. The deal was one phone call: tell Marc yes and let him take it to the front office. What sat underneath it, the part he wasn’t going to hand Marc at nine in the morning, was simpler and worse. He could not tell whether he wanted to stay in Chicago for the team or to stay near Asher. He had built an entire life on the principle of never needing something he couldn’t keep. He’d been traded twice and cut once. He had learned, young and then again and again, that a man could do everything right and still get handed a box and a flight. And now, he was supposed to carve two million dollars off his own contract and rebuild his career around a man he’d been seeing a few months. If he did that and it fell apart, he’d have done all of it for nothing.

He needed to know he wanted Chicago for Chicago, not for the man who made every hard thing sound survivable. Until he knew that, the deal was only a different way of needing someone.

“What do you want to do?” Marc said.

“Nothing yet.”

“Nothing’s a decision too, when there’s a clock on it. If you want the deal to mean anything, it has to land before they submit the list. Not after.” Marc let that sit. “Don’t run the clock out telling yourself you’re weighing it when you’re really just avoiding it.” He stopped there. He’d been Patrick’s agent long enough to know where the edge was, and that he was already past it. “Twelve days. Call me when you’ve got something.”

They hung up.

Patrick rinsed the mug, dried it, and set it back on the shelf with the others, handle aligned. Then he stood in the clean kitchen with nothing left to put away and nowhere he had to be.

Asher texted from the road that afternoon.

Bus Wi-Fi is a hate crime against productivity. Six hours to Cedar Rapids. Tell me something interesting, or I’m going to describe every stalk of corn we pass, and there’s a fuckton of it.

A week ago, Patrick would have given him something. A dry fact, a line about the corn, the small daily back-and-forth that had quietly become the best part of the day. He started to type. Stopped. Watched the cursor blink in the empty field.

If he told Asher about the call—Harmon, the list, the two million he was considering cutting and couldn’t fully explain why—Asher would be good about it. He’d ask the calm, practical questions, and one of them would be the one Patrick couldn’t answer: was he thinking about giving up that money for Chicago, or for Asher? He didn’t know. He liked playing here more than he let himself say, the city and the team, and he couldn’t tell anymore where that stopped and Asher started.

So he didn’t say anything about his call with Marc. He typed back.

The corn is load-bearing for the regional economy. Show some respect.

He read it twice. It was funny enough, and it gave nothing away, and Patrick knew the difference even if Asher didn’t yet.

Three dots, then:

There he is. Fine, the corn has earned my respect. Call tonight?

Patrick looked at the question for longer than it warranted. The honest answer was that he didn’t trust himself to talk tonight, that twenty minutes of Asher’s voice in the dark would undo what he was holding on to. He needed to hold it a while longer, until he knew what was his own idea and what was just wanting.

Long day. Might go to bed early. Maybe tomorrow.

He sent it before he could soften it, and set the phone face-down on the counter.

It was the first time Asher had asked to talk and he’d told him no.

He left the phone where it lay. He knew what maybe tomorrow would do to Asher. The old reflex had already taken over—go quiet, pull in, handle it alone—and he didn’t reach for the phone to stop it.

The days that followed were devoid of any sort of structure.

During the season, there was always a next thing—the skate, the video session, the flight, the game three nights out that organized everything before it. The schedule had been a hand at his back for years. Without it, the time had nowhere to go. He did what he’d always done with hours he couldn’t stand: walled them off one at a time and filled them.

These days, he trained early, before anyone else was in. He loaded the squat rack, put the bar across his back, and drove it up. Under the weight was the one place the rest of it went quiet—the front-office spreadsheet, the two million he hadn’t touched, the question he couldn’t answer. The bar held two hundred and seventy-five pounds. He’d built it up all spring, clean progress, a number going the right direction. Now it wouldn’t move off his shoulders. He stripped weight, chalked his hands, set up under it again. It still wouldn’t go. A de-load week, he told himself. He’d been lifting hard. His body wanted to back-off.

His body wasn’t tired. He knew the difference. The weight he couldn’t move wasn’t on the bar.