Page 50 of Caught Offside

It rang once. Twice.

“Hey.” Asher picked up, wary, the way he’d answered all week. “Everything okay?”

“No,” Patrick said. “Not really. I’ve been doing this all wrong, and I don’t want to do it over text. Can we talk?”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“Yeah,” Asher said. “Of course we can talk. I’m here.”

The flat, careful voice from the texts was gone. This was Patrick’s real one, rough at the edges.

For a second, there was only him breathing.

“This week’s been bad,” Patrick said. “And I made it your problem, and I knew I was doing it the whole time. You didn’t do anything. I need you to hear that first. None of it is you.”

The knot Asher had carried all week loosened.

“Thank you,” he said, quieter. “That helps. That helps a lot.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.” And he did. He could hear it. “Patrick, what’s going on? Talk to me. Whatever it is, I’m not going anywhere. Let me—” He made himself slow down. “You don’t have to carry it by yourself. I know we’ve never put a name on whatever this is, but I’m not just here for the sex, Patrick. I want the bad weeks too, not only the good ones.”

Patrick went quiet. A week of his flat, closed-up quiet had taught Asher to brace for impact—but this was Patrick gathering himself for something, so Asher shut his mouth and let him.

“It’s the expansion draft,” Patrick said finally. “And some stuff under the draft I haven’t figured out how to say yet. I will. I’m trying to get there.” A breath. “I’m not good at this. At letting someone in while it’s still happening.”

“I don’t want some sanitized version of your life.”

“I know you don’t. That’s the part that scares me.”

Asher pressed his eyes shut. There it was—Patrick close enough to touch and still holding something back, like talking to him through a window. Asher could see him clear as day. He just couldn’t get a hand on him.

“Then answer me one thing,” Asher said. “Are we okay? You and me. Not the draft, not the rest of it. Just us.”

“Yeah.” For the first time all week, Patrick didn’t sound like he was managing it. “We’re okay. I know I’ve done a horrible job showing it, but I think I started missing you before I even got back as far as Milwaukee.”

Asher laughed, wet and surprised. “Okay. God, you’re a lot of work.”

“I know.”

“I mean it as devotion.” He did, too, more than he could say without his voice giving him away.

There was a sound on the other end that might have been the start of a laugh. It was the best thing Asher had heard in days.

They stayed on the line a while longer, drifting into easier things—the doubleheader, Briggs’s slider, the kid in Cedar Rapids who couldn’t lay off a changeup. Patrick loosened the longer they talked. By the time they hung up, Asher felt better than he had since the morning Patrick left.

The slider came in backdoor at seventy-eight miles an hour, and the batter froze. Asher held the glove where it was, low and away, the leather framing the pitch at the edge of the zone. The umpire’s fist punched up for strike three.

He tossed the ball back to Briggs and dropped into the next sign sequence without acknowledging the strikeout. Third out, fifth inning, a two-run lead that felt as thin as the margin had been all week. He jogged toward the dugout, stripping off his chest protector on the move, grabbed his bat from the rack.

“That changeup in the third was nasty,” said Gutierrez from the far end of the bench. “You had Ramirez guessing all night.”

“He was sitting fastball. I gave him off-speed.” Asher pulled his batting gloves tight. “Not complicated.”

He singled up the middle in the fifth and stood on the bag barely feeling it. That was the tell lately. Baseball used to empty his head clean—read the hitter, put down the sign, do the work. Now, he’d call a good game and walk off and find everything exactly where he’d left it.

After, he sat against the clubhouse wall with ice taped to his knee, the ache so familiar he’d quit noticing it. The trainer had said ice and anti-inflammatories. Asher had said okay and let it go. The room did its postgame thing around him—music up, Gutierrez narrating a diving play, the rookie still glowing off his first save. A month ago, he’d have been in the middle of it, loudest guy in the room, the bit so smooth nobody saw it for one. Tonight, he didn’t have it in him. He could fake it, or he could think. Not both.