Page 63 of Caught Offside

Asher taped his wrists in a clubhouse that still didn’t feel like his and made himself a promise: he was not going to watch the expansion draft. There was nothing in it to watch. Patrick was signed, protected, done—the whole thing decided before the cameras turned on. Checking would just be his old brain doing its old job, waiting for the good thing to get taken back.

He made it to the second wrist.

The screen lit up, and it wasn’t Patrick. It was Briggs—still up in Appleton with the Fireflies, and apparently still close enough to deliver news like he was serving a subpoena. A screenshot, no message. A sports site, a headline in bold.

Zia Suns Select Syndicate Forward Kovacs in Expansion Draft

Asher read it twice. The second pass caught what the first had only registered.

The name was Kovacs. Not Patrick.

He set the roll of tape on the bench and didn’t move for a second, the locker stalls on either side of him belonging to men he’d watched on television a month ago. The clubhouse moved around him, somebody’s music low, a bat being worked over with a rag two stalls down.

Patrick had gone back to Chicago, wanting to be there when the announcement came. He’d assured them both, more than once, that he was safe. It had still taken seeing the headline for it to feel real. Kovacs had paid the price for Patrick to stay put.

Asher only knew what the name meant because Patrick had told him, in the hotel dark earlier that week, running down who the team would have to expose now that the no-move made him untouchable. Kovacs, drafted by Chicago at eighteen, never another logo. Protecting himself moved somebody else’s name up the list, and Patrick hadn’t been able to make it sound like nothing. Asher felt a specific, useless sadness for a player he’d never met who’d just found out he was leaving the only team he knew. Then his phone lit up again.

Kovacs

The whole draft compressed into a surname. Anyone else would have sent a paragraph. Patrick let the context carry it.

Asher typed back.

I know. Briggs beat you to it. You’re losing the information race to a guy hitting .231 in Triple-A.

Fuck. I hate this. I watched as they read his name. I was really hoping it wouldn’t be him.

It was always going to be someone. You did what you needed to stay where you want to be. You’ve earned that.

The typing dots cycled, stopped, and started again.

Yeah. And he’s packing a house because I did.

Asher set the phone face-down on his thigh.

He sat there, breathing. Sometime in the last minute, his shoulders had come down from around his ears, and he was grinning at a roll of wrist tape like an idiot. A big-league clubhouse was the wrong place to cry, so he didn’t.

He’d already had his answer anyway. Patrick had given it to him in an empty parking lot before any list existed, back when staying still had a price on it. Today the league just caught up.

Asher picked the phone back up and called.

Patrick answered on the second ring. “Hey.”

“Hey. How do you feel?”

Patrick took his time with it. “Like I can breathe.”

“Yeah.”

“They were going to leave me off. Right up until I made it cost more to lose me than to keep me, and put a clause on it so they couldn’t choose.” He said it flat. “I bought my own way onto that list. I’m not going to forget what it cost.”

“You shouldn’t.”

“But I’m staying.”

“Yeah,” Asher said, and had to clear his throat. “You’re staying.”

Down the row of stalls, somebody turned the music up.