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Jonny picks up Patrick’s call shirtless and from his bed, though not from an angle that suggests interrupted sleep. Light from a bedside lamp limns one half of his body, a chiaroscuro map of muscle and tendon that Patrick’s eyes run greedily over—until they hit a book blocking the rest of that very scenic view.
He squints.
“Atomic Habits? Seriously? Can’t turn it off, can you, man.”
“Hey Kaner,” Jonny says, voice rough but not sleep-heavy. He clears his throat, then: “Huh?”
His brow furrows in confusion or offense. It’s impossible to tell the difference sometimes with Jonny.
Patrick tips his head at the screen.
“A little light reading?”
“It’s....”
Jonny straightens against the pillows, looks down at the book like he’s surprised to find it there before turning down a page and setting it aside with a shake of his head.
“Rough game, buddy. I’m sorry.”
He does not say what he’s sorry for, and Patrick considers asking for about a split second before feeling mean and guilty in rapid succession.
“Yeah, it pretty much sucked,” he says, because calling things what they are is a new thing he’s trying to do in all aspects of his life. Or, all aspects of his life that don’t involve cameras and reporters.
“Might’ve gone better with Lankinen in net?” Jonny offers. There’s a slight uptick in his voice, an indication that he’s not trying to assert an aggressive opinion about this, and it has the inexplicable effect of making Patrick’s throat tighten up.
All of a sudden he doesn’t want to be talking or thinking about the shitty game, his shitty milestone, or how shitty it is to hit them when he’s alone out there. (Duncs only counts when he’s not quoting Braveheart or pretending to be a wolf, which is like...37% of the time.)
“Seriously, what’s with the bedtime reading?”
“What what?” There’s that furrowed brow again.
“You know you don’t have to be perfect and like...optimized...every minute of the day, right? Has your therapist not taught you that yet?”
Jonny was initially touchy as hell about any mention of therapy (at least to him; Patrick suspects from some things Seabs said that Jonny was a little more chill about it with other people), until Patrick told him he’d started seeing someone after . . .
When he found out his whole life was about to change.
On the screen in front of him Jonny’s rolling his eyes and swigging water, a classic Tazer stalling tactic.
“We don’t really talk about my reading habits, Kaner,” Jonny deadpans once every drop of water is drained from the bottle. He crushes the cheap plastic in one fist. Patrick’s eyes reflexively dart to the corner of the hotel room, brain prepared to tally a passel of empties that aren’t there. With no actual target, his preemptive annoyance dissolves.
“It’s going okay, though?”
Patrick asks this instead of what he really wants to ask, which is: what do you talk about?
He desperately wants to know, even as the portion of his hindbrain responsible for survival shrieks that he definitely, definitely doesn’t.
Jonny takes a moment to answer, lips pursed, like he’s really thinking about it. Patrick’s breath catches for a second in his lungs.
“It’s going,” is what he finally gets.
It’s infuriating; it’s a relief.
“Sucks your family couldn’t be there,” is Jonny’s blatant bid to turn the subject away from himself.
Patrick slumps further down the headboard and pulls his knees up, props the iPad so he can shove both hands in his hoodie pocket.
“Sucks you couldn’t be there.”
Patrick’s therapist told him about this thing called ‘radical candor’ last month, and while Patrick is 1200% certain there is such a thing as too much honesty, he’s been trying to tease out where that boundary lies with different people in his life.
He gnaws on his lower lip while he waits for Jonny’s reply.
“Yeah, I’m—.”
I’m sorry, is what Patrick hears but Jonny doesn’t say. Instead, he presses his lips together, a tight line that bespeaks a volume of frustration.
“Yeah, it sucks,” is what eventually comes out of Jonny’s mouth, the words a burst of oxygen on the tiny flare of anger Patrick’s been nursing, fairly or unfairly, against Jonny all season.
“But not enough to come back, huh?”
He knows it’s selfish, knows it’s ridiculous to make this about him (but it is about you, a small voice whispers in the back of his head) when Jonny’s going through it. But a bigger part of him feels justified and righteous. Reckless with pent up aggravation from the game, the season, the entire last goddamn year.
The lines of Jonny’s body go tense at the challenge in Patrick’s voice, like he’s bracing for a bad hit. But instead of the antagonism Patrick expects—that he craves, if he’s radically honest with his own self—he’s met with a tone of defeat.
“It’s not that simple. If it were just a matter of wanting—.”
Jonny’s face twists into something terrible before his ironclad control takes back over. Patrick’s view of him swerves, a muscle twitch in the arm holding the phone maybe, then settles again.
Patrick has what feels like a full minute to study the plaid of Jonny’s pillowcase—a dark blue or gray, something worn and homey that screams ‘Andree’—before Jonny’s reply comes, low enough that he’s not even certain it’s intended for his ears.
“If it were less about wanting, maybe.”
His tone is so bleak that the throat tightening comes back, the pressure too much to be swallowed away. The backs of Patrick’s eyes start to burn.
He balls his hands into fists, drives fingers into palms until eight tiny crescents of pain are enough of a distraction that he can speak without it coming out as tears.
“I want to be what you want.”
The words tumble forth, creaking under the weight of every bad feeling from this night and that night 9 months ago when he told Jonny the news. He’d had to get drunk to deliver it; drank even more after leaving Jonny’s place, and woke up with a hangover like he hasn’t experienced in five full years.
It felt like punishment. It felt like penance.
Jonny’s spent much of this conversation staring at a point past his phone, but at Patrick’s admission his gaze snaps back to the screen, focused and laser-sharp.
“You made your choice, Kaner. You can’t have everything.”
His voice is hard and flat, as affectless as if he were addressing a non-question about a losing streak from one of the dumber beats. That voice never portends anything good, but it’s at least familiar. It’s his face that has Patrick feeling, abruptly, every single mile between them and the hurt of unbearable choices.
He did the right thing. Didn't he do the right thing? It’s not supposed to feel like this when you do the right thing.
He curls into a tighter ball against it, like it can be condensed down, made small enough to carry around. Jonny looks just as fuck-awful as Patrick feels, but he doesn’t hang up.
The burning behind Patrick’s eyes pushes through, and Jonny doesn’t hang up. When he sniffs, the kind of noisy, undeniable thing that got him teased in locker rooms for years, Jonny looks like it’s causing him physical pain. But he doesn’t hang up, and the open line is a tether that Patrick’s stupidly, pathetically grateful for.
He can’t have everything. But this is not nothing. And they still have this.