Page 22 of Caught Offside

Asher smiled at the phone.

You need someone to send you weather updates from somewhere that isn’t miserable.

I have the Weather Channel.

The Weather Channel doesn’t have this view.

The dots appeared, disappeared, appeared again.

No. It doesn’t.

Asher set the phone down. He was in trouble, and he knew the exact shape of it because he’d walked up to this line before and he’d always stepped back over it in time.

This was the part where he was supposed to get out. Three weeks in the desert, a thousand miles, a perfect built-in reason to let the messages stretch and thin until they quit. Patrick was a closed door in a city Asher didn’t live in, in a sport that could ship him anywhere on a Tuesday. Every reason he’d given himself on the drive home from Chicago was still true. He had a whole career not to ruin and no business handing a piece of himself to a man who’d eventually do the math everyone else had done and figure out that Asher wasn’t someone you stayed for.

That was the move. Step back over the line. Leave first.

He picked the phone up again to see if Patrick had written back.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The puck rimmed around the boards, and Patrick read the play before it developed—his partner pinching to retrieve, the opposing center driving the net, and Patrick holding the middle with under four minutes left and the Syndicate up by one. He knew where the center was going. He knew which lane to close. His skates should have already been moving.

They weren’t. The center cut across the slot, and the pass threaded through the space Patrick’s stick should have occupied. The winger one-timed it past Kubara’s glove. Tie game, and the visiting bench erupted while the home crowd went quiet.

They lost in overtime on a two-on-one. Patrick was on the bench for the shift, watching a breakaway develop in the neutral zone with nothing he could do about it. The puck crossed the line and the arena stayed silent except for the visiting team piling onto each other at center ice.

Nobody talked in the locker room. Guys unlaced their skates with their heads down. Kubara sat in his stall with his elbows on his knees and his mouth shut.

Patrick showered and dressed. He was pulling on his jacket when Pruitt knocked into his shoulder on the way past, not hard, just enough to be felt. “Good game, Fonty. Forget the rest.” Patrick nodded without answering, and Pruitt didn’t wait for one.

The hallway between the locker room and the parking garage was quiet. One of the equipment managers was wheeling a cart of sticks toward the storage room and caught Patrick’s eye as he passed. “Helluva game, twenty-six. Get some rest.” Patrick raised a hand and kept walking.

He drove home with the radio off and the goal on loop—the lane, the gap, his skates not moving. By the time he was standing in his kitchen, he’d watched himself lose that half-second a hundred times, and it hadn’t given him anything back.

He pulled his phone out of his jacket pocket and set it on the counter. Three texts from Asher.

Watching the stream. You just laid out that guy on the forecheck. Violent. I approve.

That wasn’t on you.

Call me if you want. Or don’t. I’m here either way.

The first had come during the second period. The second after the tying goal. The third, fourteen minutes ago.

Patrick set the phone down, picked it up, set it down again. Then he called.

Asher picked up on the second ring. No greeting, just the sound of settling in, a creak that might have been a couch spring, and then his voice.

“Hey.”

“Hey.” Patrick leaned against the counter with the kitchen light off.

“Rough one,” Asher said.

“Yeah.” Patrick waited for the reassurance, the spin, the upbeat reframe people gave after losses because silence made them uncomfortable. His teammates did it. His mother did it. Marc did it, wrapping the platitude in agent-speak so it sounded like strategy instead of comfort. Asher didn’t say any of it.

The line stayed open. Asher was there, breathing, and the quiet between them settled into the same rhythm as the late-night FaceTime calls, where neither of them needed it to be anything more than this. Patrick had never had that with anyone who wasn’t family. After a loss, his teammates clapped his pads, said good game, and went home to their own lives. His mother called and told him to eat something. Marc texted something about the big picture. Nobody just stayed on the line.