Page 49 of Caught Offside

He went to the gym because the apartment had turned airless and he couldn’t afford to get distracted when he was lifting. The weight room was empty. He got under the bar, and for a rep or two, there was relief in it—the bar didn’t care about the draft, or Asher, or the fact that he hadn’t slept in days.

It didn’t last. By the third set the quiet was gone, and everything he’d come to outrun was back. He kept lifting anyway. Lifting badly was still better than going home to sit alone with it.

The door opened behind him. Dev came in with his bag over one shoulder, already dressed to train, and lifted his chin at Patrick in the mirror.

“Pruitt said you’ve been in here every day,” Dev said. He dropped his bag. “Alone. I told him that was just you.”

Patrick wiped the bar with his towel. “Not all of us let ourselves go just because we’re off the ice.”

Dev huffed and didn’t push. He sat on the bench against the wall, water bottle between his hands, and let the quiet sit. He wasn’t pushing, but the eyebrow he raised in the mirror said he wasn’t buying it.

Patrick loaded plates for the next set. The clang of iron echoed through the empty room.

“You’ve got something going on,” Dev said. Not a question, not an accusation. He said it to the middle distance, sparing them both the eye contact, which was his habit with anything that mattered. “I don’t need to know what. But if you wanna talk, I’m here, man.”

Patrick racked the bar. Everything in him said to finish the workout in silence and drive home. He stood there with his hands on the cold steel and didn’t.

“There’s someone I’d stay for,” he said.

The words came out flat and strange. He’d never said any of it aloud, not to anyone. Dev didn’t look surprised by the someone. He’d clocked that a while ago. The staying was the part that landed.

“And the draft might put me two thousand miles from here,” Patrick went on because the door was open now and the rest came easier than he’d expected. “And I can stop it. The day my name started landing on the speculation lists, I had Marc start on a new deal. Longer term, a no-move clause, a discount big enough that the front office comes out ahead. It’s been on the table for weeks.” He looked at the loaded bar instead of at Dev. “I haven’t signed it.”

“Why not?” No edge on it. Something gentler than curiosity.

“Because I can’t tell whether I want this because I can’t imagine playing anywhere but here, or because of him. And I’m not stupid. Cutting my own salary for something this new is asking for it to blow up in my face.” Patrick stopped. “I’ve spent my whole life not needing anything I couldn’t keep.”

Dev was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, he didn’t argue, didn’t call Patrick a coward, didn’t reach for the cheap reassurance.

“That’s the real question then,” he said. “For you, or for him.” He turned the water bottle in his hands and asked it like he was asking it of himself too. “I’ll tell you what I think, and it might be worth nothing. Guys like us get so good at not needing anybody that we lose the thread on what we actually want. The not-wanting stops being armor and turns into the whole personality.” A small motion at the corner of his mouth, aimed inward. “It’s easier to ask whether you want Chicago for the right reasons than to admit you’re scared to want it at all.”

Patrick looked at him. “Guys like us.”

Dev kept his eyes on the middle distance. He drank from the water bottle and didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.

“Anyway.” Dev stood and crossed to the rack and started loading his own bar. “I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’ve been ignoring a text since this morning because answering it means something.” He set his feet under the bar. “Figure out the want, Fonty. The need sorts itself out.”

They trained for another hour without speaking.

Patrick drove home in the late afternoon. He parked in the garage and sat in the car with the engine off.

For you, or for him.

He didn’t have an answer. What he had was a week of handing Asher less and less, hating himself for it, and doing it again the next day anyway.

He could see exactly what he was doing—getting out ahead of a loss that hadn’t happened yet, pulling back so it couldn’t gut him later—and seeing it clearly hadn’t stopped him once.

He went upstairs. He’d barely dropped his keys when the phone buzzed.

Won 6-2. Went 3 for 4. Thought you’d want to know.

Pride and guilt landed together. He started to type the safe version—That’s incredible. I’m proud of you. True, small, a door he could shut before anything got through it.

His thumb stopped over the screen.

This was the move. Every day this week, the same one: send the most mundane text he could get away with, then retreat. It hadn’t protected Asher from anything. It had left him alone on the other end, guessing. Texting was how Patrick hid, and Dev had told him to figure out the want, and he knew the want. He’d known it for months. It was three for four tonight, texting him about it.

He deleted the half-typed message. Then, before he could talk himself out of it, he called.