Page 32 of Caught Offside

Patrick watched the wing. “That obvious?”

“To me. Nobody else is looking. They’re worried about Toronto’s power play.” Dev was quiet for a moment, eyes closed. “You know you can tell me. If there’s ever anything to tell.” His eyes stayed shut. “I’d be the last guy to make it weird.”

It was the nearest either of them had come to it in three years. In a room like theirs, you kept the personal personal because the wrong word reaching the wrong guy could follow you the length of a career, out players or not. It didn’t matter that most everyone knew who he was; as long as no one said it out loud, the few bigots could pretend everyone was straight and Patrick could pretend it didn’t piss him off to know they thought less of him for who he slept with.

“I know,” Patrick said. And he did.

“Okay.” Dev let it go at that. He never asked who Patrick went home to, the same way Patrick had never asked him. Some doors you didn’t knock on. You waited for them to open.

They won the road game in overtime, and Patrick blocked a shot with the inside of his ankle that would have him taping it for a week. By the time he got back to the hotel, it was past one, the ankle had its own pulse, and he was too wired to sleep and too sore to do anything useful about it.

He FaceTimed Asher.

Asher picked up on the second ring, in bed, the lamp low behind him, his hair wrecked. He’d had a night game of his own. He looked exhausted and glad, and looking at him took some of the night’s edge off.

“There he is.” Asher had the phone propped somewhere, both hands free, grinning at Patrick like he’d been waiting all day for exactly this. “I stayed up for you. White-knuckled the whole overtime, then lay here hoping you’d call. It’s pathetic, and I don’t care even a little.”

“You won your own game tonight.”

“I did. Barely remember it.” His voice dropped. “Hard to keep your head in a baseball game when you spend it thinking about somebody’s hands.”

Patrick didn’t have an answer for that, or not one he could say aloud. Asher watched him not answer and looked unbearably pleased about it.

“You always listen to me talk about my games,” Patrick said, lower than he meant to. “I want to hear about yours for a change.”

Asher’s grin went soft. “Okay,” he said.

So Asher talked. The game first, the double he’d lined into the gap, the runner he’d thrown out at second by a step and a half, his hands moving at the edges of the frame the way they did when the real him was driving. Patrick watched and let the sound of it fill the room, easy and constant, a kind of noise he’d spent his whole life keeping out. He hadn’t known, before this, that he’d been hungry in those clean quiet rooms. He knew now.

At some point, Asher ran out of game and kept talking anyway, rolling into whatever came next, his voice going slower and warmer the later it got. He shifted down against the pillow. The collar of his shirt slid, and Patrick stopped hearing the words and started watching the line of his throat, the loose way he lay there, the want coming up low and unhurried.

Asher slowed, his eyes sharpening on the screen.

“You’re not listening to me anymore,” he said, the grin going darker. “You’re looking at me like you’ve got plans for me.”

“You’re four hundred miles away,” Patrick said.

“I know. It’s the cruelest thing in the world.” The grin was gone now, replaced by something low and serious. The baseball dropped out of his voice entirely. “Doesn’t have to stop us though. I’ll talk. You do whatever you want with your hands. And I get to watch your face the whole time.”

Patrick’s heart was going hard. He’d spent a lifetime keeping this part of himself behind doors, careful, locked down. He propped the phone where Asher would have the best view, lay back, and let him look.

Asher’s breath went ragged just watching him settle. Then his voice dropped into something Patrick hadn’t heard from him before, low and unhurried and completely in charge.

“Don’t touch yourself yet,” Asher said. “I want to look at you first.”

It should have been nothing, an order from a man four hundred miles away who couldn’t enforce a word of it. Patrick had spent his whole life being the one who set the pace. He went still anyway, hands flat on the mattress, and let Asher look.

“God.” Asher’s own breath had gone uneven, his arm already moving below the edge of the frame. “You have no idea what you look like right now. Okay. Now. Get those underwear off. I want to see all of you.”

Patrick did exactly what he was told.

“Fuck, you’re gorgeous.” Asher licked his lips. “Touch yourself. Pretend it’s my fingers teasing you.”

He wrapped a hand around his cock, and the first stroke pulled a sound out of him he didn’t recognize.

“There it is.” Asher’s voice was wrecked and delighted at once. “Wish that was my hand instead of yours. All that control, and you’d hand it right over to me. Tell me you’ve thought about it. The kitchen. The night I had you up against that counter.”

“I’ve thought about it.” It came out rough, barely his.