Page 37 of Caught Offside

“We’ll get better at it.” Patrick said it like a thing he’d already decided. “People do this. We pick the days we can get, and we make them count. I’m good at scheduling.”

Asher pushed up on an elbow to look at him because that was a lot of words from Patrick, and every one of them sounded like a plan. “Did you just make logistics romantic?”

“I make everything romantic. You’re only now noticing.”

“God, you’re smug when you’re naked.” Asher dropped back down and fit himself along Patrick’s side. “Okay. We’ll figure it out.”

They didn’t sleep for a long time. They talked in low voices, the conversation wandering and slowing by degrees until it trailed off and left only the quiet, Asher’s hand on Patrick’s chest and Patrick’s hand over it.

In the morning, the season would pull them back into their separate lives—the games, the miles, the calendar with no give in it. Laying there in the dark with Patrick’s heartbeat slow and certain under his palm, Asher couldn’t make any of it feel like a wall. It felt like something they were going to beat. He believed it the way he hadn’t let himself believe in anything in a long time, and for once, he fell asleep first, sure all the way down that this was going to work.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A minute left and down two, Patrick threw everything he had left into it. He won the puck along the wall, moved it to Kubara at the line, crashed the net for a rebound that never came. For a few seconds, eighteen thousand people in his own building were on their feet and roaring, sure they were about to see a miracle.

Then the horn killed it, and the roar dropped out of the building all at once.

He stood at the far blue line and watched the other bench empty, gloves and sticks flung across the ice in front of it, the whole team collapsing into a pile as their goalie raced out from the net to meet them. The series was over, four games to two. The Syndicate’s season ended quietly, a team that had played well enough to extend it but never well enough to advance.

Kubara tapped him on the shin pad, the captain’s skate-by. Patrick followed the line of gray jerseys toward the bench. His legs felt fine. His breathing was even. The physical machinery was intact, which was the cruelest part of losing, the body insisting it could keep going while the scoreboard said otherwise.

The handshake line formed at center ice. Patrick shook hands with each player, same pressure, same nod, including the center who’d beaten him clean on the series-winning goal in game six and the defenseman whose cross-checks had left a bruise chain along his ribs. He didn’t linger on either. He got through the line with his spine straight because it was the only part of losing he could control.

Losing at home had its own cruelty. On the road, you got on a plane and let the flight do some of the work of ending it. Tonight, there was nowhere to go but their own tunnel and locker room, a roomful of men sinking into the stalls they’d dressed in all season with nothing left to do but feel it.

Nobody spoke at first. Patrick sat in his stall and began undressing. Gloves, helmet, the slow work of unlacing skates with fingers that had been gripping a stick all game. He’d played twenty-six minutes tonight, logged four blocked shots, kept his gap tight through three periods of Toronto’s forechecks. What the numbers couldn’t show lived in the margins, the half-step he’d lost in the third period of game four, the positioning lapse in game five that Toronto exploited with a cross-seam pass he should have read two seconds earlier. They were small failures, and they compounded over a series.

Pruitt broke the silence by throwing his helmet into his bag. “Bullshit,” he said.

Kubara looked up. He held Pruitt’s gaze until Pruitt exhaled, sat down, and started pulling tape from his socks.

Barlow came in a while later. He stood at the center of the room and delivered the end-of-season address. He thanked them for the year. He named specific moments: Kubara’s overtime winner in game three, Pruitt’s blocked shot in game one, Dev’s two-way play.

“You did your jobs,” Barlow said. “The result doesn’t change that.”

Patrick heard it at a distance. The words were kind, yet they meant nothing because the people who actually decided things didn’t sit in this room. To them, a roster was a spreadsheet, and every man in here was a number that justified itself or didn’t. A season like the one he’d just played bought him nothing he could count on keeping. He’d learned that young, in junior hockey, when a coach shook his hand after cutting him and said, with complete sincerity, “You did nothing wrong.” Patrick had done nothing wrong plenty of times since, and it had never once been enough to keep him anywhere.

He showered fast, dressed in his suit, and sat back in his stall with his phone. The team group chat had blown up. His mother had sent two texts, both in French, asking if he was okay and telling him she loved him in the same breath because Sylvie Fontaine did not separate inquiry from reassurance. His father had sent one. Fier de toi, mon gars. Proud of you.

And Asher.

I’m sorry. That was a helluva series, and you were the best player on the ice tonight. I know that doesn’t help, but I’m saying it anyway.

Sent the moment the game ended. Asher had watched every game of the series.

They’d talked nearly every night too, late, after both their games, the two of them wrung out and easy on the phone in the dark. It had become the part of the day Patrick pointed himself toward. That night in Appleton, in Asher’s bed, they’d sworn they’d find the time for this, and they’d believed it, both of them, completely. A whole series of stolen, half-awake phone calls had shown him what finding the time actually looked like. From the wreckage of this room, Appleton already felt like another life.

He wanted to call him. He sat with his thumb over Asher’s name long enough to know that hearing that voice right now would take him apart, and he couldn’t come apart here, not in a room full of his teammates. So he typed instead.

Appreciate it. Long night. I’ll call you tomorrow.

He sent it before he could make it any colder than that.

He leaned back against the stall and closed his eyes. The room moved around him, the zip of bags, the low bass of Pruitt’s voice, the scratch of a pen on paper. A team packing up a season.

Marc called the next morning.

Patrick was standing at the kitchen counter with a coffee he’d made before dawn and hadn’t finished. The game had ended late. He’d driven home, showered, managed a few hours of thin sleep. Woke to the alarm he’d forgotten to disable and lay in the dark a while. He’d been up since, moving through a morning that had no practice, no video session, no structure.