Page 51 of Caught Offside

His phone was in his locker. He didn’t check it.

Things were better now, mostly. Patrick texted back like himself, picked up when Asher called, dropped the flat careful act the week had been. But every time Asher nudged toward the draft, or toward whatever had Patrick up at night, Patrick slid them somewhere warmer, so smoothly that Asher would be two topics past it before he noticed he’d been handled. The door was open again. A crack of it, but Patrick’s shoulder was against the rest.

They hadn’t broken up. They were good, even, and that was the hell of it—nothing to point at, nothing to fix, just the man he was falling for holding him off with a smile, so nice about it that quitting would’ve been the easy thing.

And there was always the out. If the call to Milwaukee ever came, he could climb into the life he’d wanted since he was a kid and let himself believe Patrick drifted first. Nobody could prove otherwise. He’d leave clean, the way he always left, and call it timing instead of fear.

He showered, dressed, picked up his phone.

One message from Patrick, sent before the game.

Busy day. Hope tonight goes well.

Easy and warm, the way the texts hadn’t been a week ago. Asher typed back without overthinking it.

Won again. 3 for 4. Knee’s barking, but I’ll live. Call you tonight?

Patrick’s reply was waiting by the time he got home.

Long day, about to crash. Tomorrow, I promise.

Tomorrow. Asher read it twice. Probably nothing—Patrick was tired, people got tired. But some part of him heard the old retreat in it, the door easing back toward the jamb, and he set the phone face-down so he’d quit reading it that way.

He went to bed. The far side was empty, the way it always was when Patrick was hours south. Tonight, Asher felt it anyway. Not the sex, or not just that. He just missed him, plain and all the way down.

Patrick had been in this bed three or four times, enough to leave an impression his body recalled without permission: how he slept on his back with one arm across his chest, controlled even in unconsciousness. How his breathing changed in the minutes before sleep, the steady rhythm breaking into something slower and less guarded. The weight of his hand settling on Asher’s hip at three in the morning without waking.

Asher rolled over and pressed his face into the pillow. The cotton smelled like his own laundry detergent and nothing else. For a brief window, there had been the trace of whatever Patrick used after he shaved, clean with something resinous underneath, a scent Asher had first caught pressed against the hinge of Patrick’s jaw.

He wanted to call and ask what they were doing. But he knew how it would go. A good call, an easy one, Patrick warm right until Asher pushed at anything real, then a smooth turn to some other subject Asher wouldn’t have the heart to fight. He’d hang up feeling better and no closer to anything.

So he didn’t call. He lay in the dark, the empty half of the bed right there beside him, and ran the loop he’d been running all week. None of it was his to fix. Not the draft, not Patrick holding him at the door, not the chickenshit part of him that kept eyeing Milwaukee like an exit. Give him a runner on third and a hitter who couldn’t lay off the slider, and he’d know exactly what to do. This, he had nothing for. No idea how to get Patrick to let him all the way in, and even less how to keep from bolting before he did.

Pops called, and Asher had the phone to his ear by the second ring.

He never picked up on the second ring when things were fine. When things were fine, he called Pops. He called during car rides, between innings, and from grocery store parking lots because talking to Pops was the easiest thing he did, the relationship that required no performance. When things were fine, Asher called first and talked too much, and Pops listened and laughed and gave it to him straight at the end, the way he always did.

When things weren’t fine, Asher went silent. And Pops recognized the silence and picked up the phone.

“Hey, kid.”

“Hey, Pops.” Asher tried to put something light in it and heard himself miss by a mile.

The pause that came back was the kind Pops used when he’d already heard everything he needed to. “That bad.”

“It’s nothing. Long stretch.”

“You’ve gone quiet on me. You don’t go quiet. You once called me from a gas station to wax poetic about a sandwich.”

“It was a really good sandwich.”

“It was a gas-station sandwich.”

A laugh got out before Asher could stop it, thin and not quite steady.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s been a week.”

Pops didn’t rush him. Asher could hear the background sounds of the Milwaukee house, the faint hum of the kitchen, a television in another room.