Page 33 of Caught Offside

“I know you have. Faster now. There you go.” Asher’s eyes never left the screen, and his mouth never stopped. “You want to know what I wanted that night, after I left you standing in your kitchen and drove home with my hands shaking on the wheel? I wanted to get down on my knees right there. Belt off, jeans open, your hands in my hair, my mouth on you, and I wouldn’t have stopped for anything. Not for practice. Not for the season. Nothing.”

Patrick’s hips jerked off the bed. The sound that came out of him was wrecked.

“God yeah. That’s it.” Asher’s voice was unspooling now, fast and filthy and barely holding its shape. “And next time, there’s no clock. I get you in a real bed, and I take all the time in the world. I’m going to taste every inch of you. I’m going to take you apart so slowly you forget how to hold still. I want to know what you sound like with nothing left to keep quiet with. I’ve wanted to wreck you for months, Patrick.”

Patrick couldn’t have answered if his life depended on it. He didn’t try. He let Asher’s voice run the whole thing, his own hand barely the point anymore, undone by words alone. On the screen, Asher had his head back and his throat working, gone with it.

“Don’t hold back on me,” Asher breathed. “I want to watch you lose it. Come on, Patrick. Let me see.”

Patrick did. His hips came up off the mattress. The heat pulled tight and low, and he stopped holding any of it back. Patrick, who had built a life on holding still and keeping quiet, came apart in a hotel bed to the sound of Asher Tucker entirely unable to stop talking. He heard Asher go over a few seconds behind him, a sound bitten off around Patrick’s name, and then nothing but the two of them breathing.

After, they lay in their two dark rooms with the phones still on, both of them breathing, neither moving to end it. Asher’s eyes were half-shut. The lamp light lay gold along the side of his face.

Patrick could have said goodnight. He didn’t want to, and he’d spent three months not wanting to and pretending otherwise. His pulse was still coming down. The dark made things easier to say.

“I spent months telling myself this was a bad idea,” he said. “That I couldn’t afford it. That there was no room in my life for something I couldn’t keep control of.”

Asher didn’t reach for a joke or a fix. He just waited.

“I can’t make myself believe any of it anymore.” Patrick had never said a thing like this aloud to anyone, and he said it now, wrung out and unguarded with Asher’s face soft on the screen. “I’ve never needed anybody. I don’t know how to do this without trying to manage it, and I can’t manage it. It scares the hell out of me, but I’m doing it anyway. I want you to know I’ve stopped fighting it.”

When Asher answered, the humor had gone out of his voice. “I’ve been there since the gala,” he said. “I was starting to think you’d never say it aloud.”

Patrick almost smiled into the dark, and he didn’t fight that either.

They stayed on the line a while after that, the talk going loose and aimless, neither of them willing to be the one to hang up. Asher’s eyes kept drifting shut.

“Go to sleep,” Patrick said. “You’ve got a game tomorrow.”

“So do you.” Asher didn’t move to end it. He yawned instead. “You said maybe you’d come up. To Appleton.”

“I said maybe.”

“You’ve got a few days before round one though. Before it all kicks off.” The bravado had gone out of his voice, leaving something softer. “We’re home. Come up, spend them with me. No pressure. I just really want you to.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Goodnight, Patrick.”

“Goodnight.”

Patrick set the phone on his chest and lay in the dark. There were a few empty days coming before round one, the kind he’d always filled with extra ice and video. Part of him still wanted to. The rest of him wanted to spend them in Appleton, in the life Asher had built up there. Wanting something that wasn’t the work was new, and it didn’t feel like a weight. It felt like something to look forward to, and he couldn’t remember the last time anything had.

CHAPTER TEN

Asher had cleaned the apartment twice, changed the sheets, and was now sitting on his couch, working hard to look like a man who had done neither.

Patrick was coming. Asher had spent the morning waiting for the text that called it off—because that was how these things usually went—but it hadn’t come. Patrick only had a few days before the playoffs swallowed his month, and he was spending one of them driving up to Appleton. Asher didn’t know what to do with that. Nobody spent a day they could’ve kept for themselves on him.

Monday meant no game, just a lift, an hour of PT on the knee, then a cage session Asher cut short because his head wasn’t in it. It hadn’t been Saturday either, when he’d gone zero-for-four, the quiet kind, and Delgado pulled him aside after.

“Get your head right,” Delgado had told him. “Wherever it is, go get it.” Then, on his way out, he’d turned back. “And ease up. The big club’s been asking about you. Navarro’s wrist has him day-to-day again, and your name keeps coming up in their meetings. Don’t make them watch you press.”

Lately their whole thing had lived on the phone, Patrick’s voice in the dark after both their games, the two of them too wrecked to make much sense. Today Patrick would be here in person, and Asher had given up on getting anything done in the meantime.

The buzzer went a little after four.

Asher let him up and had the door open before Patrick reached it. He came down the hall, bag on his shoulder, road-rumpled from the drive, and the pull in Asher’s chest was as stupid and certain as it had been since the gala. Patrick stopped in front of him, close, not touching yet.