Page 7 of Caught Offside

“I do.” He wanted to place a hand on Patrick’s shoulder and tell him to relax. Remind him he was safe here. No one would judge him for being himself. “But seriously, are you here voluntarily or did the team make you come?”

Patrick’s eyes narrowed. Not offended, sharpened. “No one makes me do anything. My agent thought it’d be good for me to make an appearance.”

“Fair,” Asher said, amused that he’d gotten a rise out of Patrick. And impressed that he wasn’t above using his celebrity to help kids.

“So you can see why it’s not an insult that I might not want to be brutally honest about my motivation for being here.”

“I didn’t take it as one. I took it as the first real thing either of us has said in this conversation.”

Patrick studied him. The assessment had changed, less clinical, more considered. Asher had done something unexpected, and Patrick was recalculating.

“The foundation does real work. I don’t mind supporting that. I mind the—” He gestured, a small movement that took in the room, the noise, the social machinery of a gala.

“All the pomp,” Asher said.

Patrick held his gaze for a beat. “Yeah.”

“Same. I mean, I’m not super familiar with this group, but my dads asked me to come, so I’m here.”

“Your dads? Like plural?”

Asher was used to that reaction. If he wasn’t in a safe environment, he referred to them as his parents, but he wanted to see how Patrick reacted. Curiosity was good.

“Yeah, Sean Tucker’s my dad and Mason Atley is my other dad, but I call him Pops.”

“Cool.”

They stood at the bar for a while after that. The conversation drifted without direction, the gala, the foundation, the exhaustion of being a professional athlete in a room full of professional athletes all pretending they weren’t sizing each other up. Patrick said little, but the silence had edges. When he spoke, it was specific, observations sharper than they first sounded, humor so dry it took Asher a beat to catch it.

They talked about Chicago. Patrick had been with the Syndicate for three years. He mentioned the lake and the practice facility but gave up nothing about his personal life. He didn’t bring up the speech or Asher’s dad, and Asher liked him for it.

Someone brushed past them to order a drink, and Patrick shifted closer to make room. Close enough that when he turned his head, Asher could see the scar across his left cheekbone, thin and silver.

A woman from the foundation board appeared at Asher’s elbow and pulled him into a conversation about the auction. By the time he’d extracted himself, the spot at the bar was empty. Patrick had left his glass on the counter, napkin folded beside it, and was gone.

Asher stood there for a second, then laughed under his breath. The first person worth talking to all night, and he was the one who’d left without a word.

He found Pops near the stage with his dad, who’d emerged from whatever backstage decompression he’d needed after the speech. His dad had his jacket off and his sleeves pushed up, the most undone Asher had ever seen him at a public event. Pops had a hand on his dad’s arm, not performative, just contact built from decades of knowing where the other person needed to be touched.

“There he is.” Pops’s face opened up. “We were about to send a search party.”

“I was at the bar.”

“For forty minutes?”

Had it been that long? Asher ran the math and came up short. The conversation with Patrick had felt like ten, maybe fifteen minutes. Time that hadn’t tracked because he hadn’t been counting.

“I met someone,” Asher said, and regretted the phrasing before the sentence was finished. “I mean someone my age. A hockey player. Plays for the Syndicate.”

Pops’s eyebrow went up in a way Asher recognized as dangerous. “A hockey player.”

“Don’t.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You said it with your eyebrow.”

His dad, who had been listening with the half-attention of a man still metabolizing the adrenaline of three hundred people, looked between them. “What did I miss?”