Page 54 of Caught Offside

Patrick glanced at him.

“Yeah.” Dev turned the coffee cup between his hands. “He asked if I wanted to get dinner. Normal thing. Teammates getting dinner.” He took a sip. “I’ve been staring at the text for three hours.”

Patrick knew better than to think it was just a simple text. The only question now was what Patrick was supposed to do about his teammate opening up to him. This was Dev handing him something real and trusting him not to drop it. Patrick had spent years convinced he was the only one in any room he walked into. He wasn’t. He never had been.

“Three hours. I wrote four different responses, deleted all of them, put my phone in a drawer, took it out of the drawer, and drove here.” Dev’s mouth moved, an inward expression, a man examining his own machinery. “It’s dinner. With a person I eat dinner with regularly. And I’ve turned it into a strategic operation because if I say yes in the wrong way, he might hear something I’m not ready for him to hear, and if I say no, I spend the night in my apartment wishing I’d said yes.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Patrick asked.

Dev looked at him. The gaze was direct and patient, stripped of deflection.

“Because I’m about to give you advice I can’t follow myself, and I need you to take it seriously even though the source is compromised.” He set the coffee down. “You look like shit, Fonty.”

“Thanks.”

“You look like a man who’s been sleeping four hours a night and spending the other twenty convincing himself that the thing he wants is the thing he should be afraid of. I know what that looks like because I see it every morning.” He tapped his own chest. “Right here.”

Patrick leaned against the squat rack.

“The draft is in three days,” he said.

“I know when the draft is. I just don’t know what happens after.”

“Nobody knows what happens after. That’s what after means.” Dev picked up the coffee again. “Here’s what I know. I know you had something. I know it was real because I watched you change, and you are not a man who changes for anything less than real. And I know you’ve spent the last week treating that something like a liability instead of—” He stopped, searched for the word. “The reason.”

“The reason for what?”

“For any of it. Chicago, hockey, the apartment you go home to. What’s the point of fighting to stay if you’ve already emptied out everything worth staying for?”

Dev stood up, collected his coffee, and looked at Patrick with an expression that had shed every layer of compartmentalization. Tired. Clear-eyed.

“Call him back,” Dev said. “Or get in your car and drive up there. I don’t care which. But stop doing this.” He gestured at the gym, the empty room, the loaded bar. “This isn’t discipline, and we both know it.”

He left.

Patrick stood in the empty weight room with the loaded bar in front of him and didn’t put another set on it. Dev had walked in carrying two coffees and his own unanswered text and said the thing Patrick had been working not to hear: the discipline had stopped being discipline a while ago. He’d known it since the morning the first squat refused to move. He’d just needed it said aloud.

He drove home. Sat in the car with the engine off and his hands on the wheel.

What’s the point of fighting to stay if you’ve already emptied out everything worth staying for?

Dev had asked him, days back, whether he wanted Chicago for himself or for Asher, and Patrick had treated not knowing as permission to do nothing. He knew now. Chicago was the first place that had ever been his, not assigned by a draft, not survived, not endured. He wanted to keep it whether or not he and Asher lasted the season. And he wanted Asher too. Wanting both didn’t make either one a weakness. That part he was still getting used to.

He sat on the couch. The lake was visible through the window, a strip of blue between buildings.

He was done. Done fighting this, done treating the best thing in his life like a variable to be controlled, done with the silence and the measured texts and the four-hour sleep and the two-hundred-seventy-five-pound squat that wouldn’t move because his body had known for weeks what he hadn’t let himself: the problem was never the bar.

The expansion draft was in four days. The uncertainty hadn’t resolved. Nothing external had changed.

What changed was this: he stopped requiring the answers before he moved.

It was the inverse of how he’d done everything else. He’d spent his life refusing to commit until the path was clear, gathering information, modeling outcomes, certain it was wisdom. If he never fully showed up, he could never be left, and he’d gotten very good at not showing up. It had kept him safe, and it had kept him alone, and he was through with both.

He picked up his phone and called Marc.

It rang twice. “Patrick.”

“Take the deal,” Patrick said. “Three years, the no-move. If you can pull a fourth out of them, do it, but don’t let the term be the thing that runs us past the list. Get it signed before the deadline.”