Page 46 of Caught Offside

“How was your day?” Asher said.

“Fine. Trained. Nothing much.”

Asher knew Patrick’s fines by now. There was the one with a breath behind it, the one that meant something was weighing on him. There was the one with his jaw tight, the one that meant he was angry and holding it down. This was the third kind, the flat one he’d been getting all week, and it meant Patrick had pulled all the way back inside himself and nothing Asher said tonight was going to reach him.

“Patrick.” He kept his voice level. “You can talk to me. I don’t even need the details. I just need you to stop going quiet on me.”

“There’s nothing to tell yet. It’s a process. It plays out.”

“That’s not—” Asher stopped himself. Pushing had never once worked on Patrick. It only made him pull further in. “Okay. I’ll leave it. I just don’t want you going through it alone.

“I could come down,” Asher said, the idea out before he’d weighed it. “After the trip. I’ve got a day before the homestand. I’ll get in the car. We don’t even have to talk about any of it. I’ll just be there⁠—”

“You don’t need to do that.”

“I know I don’t need to. I want to.”

“Asher.” A pause, and in it he heard the last of Patrick pull back, polite and final. “It’s not a good week. Let me get through the draft. I’ll be better company after.”

Lately, it was always after with Patrick, after the draft and after the list, and the better day he kept promising never actually came.

The silence on the line had a weight to it, not dead air, just the quiet of a man on the other end with nothing to say to him. Asher thought about his running shoes, still by Patrick’s door, the ones Patrick had never once asked him to come get.

“I’m sorry,” Patrick said.

It was two words, quiet and true, and worse than if he’d said nothing because it meant he could hear exactly what Asher was offering and was choosing not to take it.

Asher held the silence. He didn’t fill it. A month ago, he’d have had a joke in the chamber before the quiet got uncomfortable, something to defuse it, something that let them both off the hook. He sat in it instead and let it be what it was. He hated every second, but he didn’t hang up.

“I should let you sleep,” Patrick said finally. “Tomorrow’s a long day.”

“You don’t have anything tomorrow.” He didn’t keep the hurt out of it. “It’s the offseason.”

A pause. “Goodnight, Asher.”

“Night.”

The call ended. Asher sat with the phone in his hand in the grinding cold of the hotel room and looked at the second bed nobody was in.

His knee throbbed under the melted ice, a dull insistent pulse he’d been outrunning for a week. He thought about the trainer’s thumbs, the word MRI, and how his body had picked this exact stretch to start breaking down, right as the call he’d waited four years for finally edged into reach. If the knee turned out to need surgery and months on the shelf, the call could come while he was laid up and no good to anyone.

He’d spent his whole life certain that baseball was the one thing that would still be there when everything else got complicated. Lately, even the scoreboard had started to feel like it was on loan. Patrick going quiet, the knee going loud, the call-up and the expansion draft loading into the same handful of days from opposite directions. It was a lot of ground shifting at once for a man whose whole game was built on planting his back foot and driving through something.

He scrolled up instead of typing.

Farther up the thread, before the last week of careful, going-nowhere exchanges, the messages used to run long and stupid and constant. Patrick had corrected his grammar at one in the morning. He’d roasted the sad gas-station hot dog Asher sent a photo of, then a minute later told him to eat a vegetable. He’d answered the one real zone-coverage question Asher asked with three careful paragraphs because talking about hockey mechanics was easy.

Somewhere in the thread was a voice memo, forty seconds of Patrick explaining gap control in that flat, certain voice with a hockey game going behind him, that Asher had played more times than he’d ever say aloud.

That was the real Patrick, under all the quiet. Asher had gotten all the way in for a few months, the dry humor, the patience, the way Patrick said his name like it was a whole sentence.

He locked the phone before he could do something pathetic, like play the voice memo again, and made himself set it down.

He should have texted something light. He had it half-written already, the kind that let them both off the hook and asked for nothing. No worries. We’ll talk when the dust settles.

And it would be easy. Go quiet, go busy, let it fade until it was over and nobody had to say so aloud.

The draft wasn’t even the worst of it. That morning, the injury feed had Navarro out, day-to-day with a bad wrist, and under the plain jolt of wanting the spot, some part of him had felt something uglier, something too close to relief.