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Contrary to popular belief, they don’t have to play together to be good.
Case in point: Art’s in the stands nursing a lemonade and Patrick’s on the court by himself, and he’s doing great. Better than great, really. He’s fucking perfect.
Beside him, Tashi is on the edge of her seat, hands clasped together, leg bouncing, mouth half-open. Her head is whipping back and forth between both sides of the net, dark eyes following the ball with an intensity that made her look like she might as well be the one on court. It’s the kind of obsessiveness that she hasn’t really shown since she had to stop playing. It reared its head once in a while when she was coaching Art up the ranks, but that desperate, all-consuming, heart-in-your-fucking-mouth drive didn’t fully come back to her until Tiretown two years ago.
It came back for Art then, too.
But he isn’t watching the ball like Tashi is. His eyes are following Patrick’s movements around the court instead. Art likes playing a game with himself like this, in the rare times Patrick plays Singles without him. He watches Patrick and tries to guess at what he’ll do next. Whether he’ll backhand or volley or try the tricky new slice Tashi’s been drilling them on for the past month.
Nine times out of ten, Art wins.
But one time out of ten, Patrick manages to catch him by surprise. Sometimes, it’s because Patrick does something he and Tashi worked on alone if Art was with the other trainer, or if Art was taking Lily out somewhere that day. Other times, it’s because Patrick does something so spectacularly stupid Art would never have thought to do it in a thousand years.
To Patrick’s credit, it almost always pays off.
And then, today, it doesn’t.
It’s the last set and Patrick’s in the lead and there’s no real need to do anything risky except for the fact that Art and Tashi are watching from the stands and Patrick, because he’s Patrick, wants to show off.
His opponent manages a particularly strong overhead smash, and the ball heads for the net while Patrick’s halfway up his side of the court. He’s too far and it’s too close for comfort. He could throw the point now and earn it back later, but that’s not the kind of game Patrick Zweig ever wants to play.
He goes for the ball.
It’s only because Art was already watching him so closely that he sees the exact moment Patrick fucks up.
He runs three feet forward and snaps his left knee on the fourth.
Patrick screams.
Art’s not a faithful man most days. He started growing out of his parents’ religion around the same time he fell in love with tennis which, in turn, was around the same time he met Patrick.
But as Art watches Patrick go down—the same exact way he watched Tashi go down, helpless in the stands—for the first time in nearly twenty years, Art reaches for God.
Tashi’s hand reaches back.
They’re both on their feet, and Art’s lemonade is seeping into the floor, and Wimbledon is erupting around them but Art can hardly hear it because of the pounding in his ears.
Fuck, he thinks, not again.
The only thing that does make it through to him is Tashi’s voice, fierce and unyielding.
“Go,” she says. So Art goes.
He and Tashi, hand in hand, push their way through the crowd and thunder down the stairs to the grass. Tashi’s heel breaks halfway down, so she snaps the clasps off both her thousand-dollar pumps and snatches them into her free hand without missing a beat. Art has half a mind to carry her the rest of the way down, but Tashi’s not stopping for anything, so neither is he.
They make it to the court where the medics have already swarmed Patrick. Art can’t see the extent of the injury, but he can see Patrick’s face—teeth gritted, sweat plastering his hair to his brow. Art doesn’t let go of Tashi’s hand even as he goes to his knees by Patrick’s head.
His eyes are squeezed shut, so he jerks when Art pushes his hair back from his face.
“Hey,” Art says, “it’s just us.”
Patrick’s eyes open—bluer than they usually are. Art realizes with a start that he’s crying.
“Tash,” Patrick groans out. “Tash, how bad is it?”
Tashi doesn’t say anything, and when Art turns around, he realizes it’s because Tashi isn’t even looking at the injury. She’s looking at Patrick, her face ashen.
Her broken heels are still clutched in her other hand. Art remembers Patrick getting them for her birthday last year.
“Tash,” Patrick says again, desperately. “Is it bad? Can I still play?”
That finally snaps Tashi back.
“Like hell you are,” she says viciously.
“No.” Patrick screws his eyes shut again, tears leaking down into the court. He leans his head back against the grass, not looking at either of them. “ No. Come on. I can do it. Just help me up, I’ll show you. Art, tell her —”
Art glances at the medics. One of them meets his eyes and shakes his head, once.
It feels like a guillotine slicing through the air between them.
Art swallows and looks down at Patrick.
“Hey, man,” he says, roughly, because he wants to call Patrick something else but there are medics and journalists and a whole stadium full of people watching. “We got you, okay? We got you.”
Patrick slings one arm over his eyes and lets out a long, trembling breath. “It hurts. It fucking hurts .”
Art’s heart fractures, and he wants nothing more than to pick Patrick up and take him and Tashi away from here, away from all the cameras and prying eyes, but that’s not supposed to be his job. It might be, if they were alone. But with the whole world watching, he’s just Patrick Zweig’s Doubles partner.
“Yeah, man,” Art says softly. “I know it hurts.”
“Maybe you can just… pop my knee back in?” There’s so much hope in the way he says it that Art’s not sure whether to laugh or cry at the absurdity of it all. Because it is absurd. How was it possible for this to be happening to them, again? Tragedies are hardly uncommon in their sport, but Art always thought that they paid their due when Tashi injured her knee. Didn’t they earn a lifetime’s worth of good fucking karma after that?
“Pat,” Tashi says. She hardly ever calls him that, and it makes Patrick’s shallow breaths catch for a moment. “Stop being an idiot. It’s over. It’s fucking over. We’re getting you out of here.”
Patrick slumps back against the grass, finally defeated.
“Okay,” he says quietly.
Art looks up at his wife and sees what Patrick can’t: her lips pressed together in a pale line and her eyes shining with something Art hasn’t seen on her since Art’s own injury, or when she had to go into early labor for Lily. Panic . Wild, unreserved panic—the type Tashi would rather die than admit to, because she’s supposed to be Tashi fucking Duncan, the one who has it together, the one who has all the answers, the one who can fix everything.
It’s only there until they hear the ambulance sirens, but Art will never forget that look on her face for as long as he lives.
Tashi stands up straighter as the ambulance drives up right to the edge of the court and the medics bring out a stretcher. Her eyes harden, and she’s Tashi fucking Duncan again.
“We’re going to pick you up now, Mr. Zweig,” one of the medics says as they lay the stretcher out beside him.
“Just get it over with,” Patrick grits out.
They move him, and he holds back a scream that Art hears anyway. Once he’s on the stretcher, they start carrying him to the ambulance. Tashi helps Art to his feet and they begin to follow, but they’re stopped by a medic, who shakes her head at the both of them.
“Sorry,” she says, “but there’s not enough room in the ambulance. Immediate family only, please.”
“But I’m his coach ,” Tashi says with the same inflection other people reserve for the word wife.
If the medic senses it, she doesn’t give anything away. She just repeats, “Immediate family only,” before walking to the ambulance, where they’ve laid Patrick out in the back.
He’s leaning back on his elbows, looking at them across the court with childlike confusion, wondering why they weren’t following.
“We’ll be right on your tail!” Tashi promises as the medics clamber in after Patrick. “Do you hear me? We’ll be—”
The ambulance doors slam shut.
They drive Patrick off.
Art and Tashi watch the ambulance drive away. They’re still holding on to each other. Art thinks Tashi might just be the only thing keeping him afloat, and when Tashi makes a small, choked sound, he wonders if he might be doing the same thing for her.
“Car keys,” Tashi says suddenly. “Do you have—”
Art’s already taking his phone out of his pocket and tugging Tashi, still barefoot, across the grass. “No time,” he says. “We parked too far.”
“Taxi.”
“Uber,” Art agrees, booking the first one available, surge pricing be damned.
He and Tashi stumble through the stadium, ignoring the hundred little camera flashes sparking after them. They’re already announcing Patrick’s forfeit over the speakers, and Art doesn’t understand how everything can just go on like that. How the next players could so easily take their spot where Patrick was just standing, playing one of the greatest matches of his entire career. How the scoreboards can just be wiped clean, erasing every trace that Patrick ever played at all.
It’s ridiculous and stupid and so goddamn unfair.
Patrick Zweig might never play another game again.
The whole world should stop fucking turning.
When they get to the hospital, the nurse at the front desk asks them what their relation to the patient is, and Tashi doesn’t know what the fuck to say.
It’s not something they’ve ever discussed because it didn’t need discussion. They didn’t even talk about living together; it happened so naturally that one day, Tashi looked up from making them all breakfast and realized Patrick hadn’t gone back to his own apartment in three weeks. She could have brought it up then—this unsaid thing between them—but she didn’t. She just kept making eggs the way Patrick likes them.
The closest they ever came to talking about it was when Lily came home from school one day with a contemplative knot in her brows. She found the three of them in the living room, Patrick and Tashi leaning on opposite sides of the couch, their legs tangled between them, Art on the floor with his arm hitched up against Patrick’s knee while Tashi played with his hair. They were watching an old Doubles game and going through each mistake the boys made and what Tashi would have done differently.
“See? Right there,” Tashi said, kicking at Patrick’s side. “You could’ve easily spun that. Mendez’s right was wide open.”
“Okay but have you considered that Mendez was a fast little fu—oh, hey, little shark,” Patrick said as Lily came in, dropping her school bag noisily on the floor. “Long day at school, huh?”
Bluntly, Lily asked, “Are you my mom’s boyfriend or my dad’s?”
That got their attention.
Patrick jerked upright while Tashi reached for the remote to pause the match right before Art’s serve. On the floor, Art opened his arms out to Lily, who walked straight into them and settled into her father’s lap.
“Why d’you ask, sweetie?” Art asked, giving Lily a small kiss to her temple. “Did someone say something at school?”
“Yeah,” Lily said glumly. “Miss Tyler did.”
Behind her, Patrick and Tashi exchanged a heavy look. This was not in the plan, though it should have been. Lily was bound to start asking questions, and Tashi should have prepared for it, but it’s a tall order to explain something she herself didn’t know the answer to.
“We were making family trees,” Lily continued, playing with one of Art’s hands. “And I put Uncle Pat there and Miss Tyler asked who he was and I said my Uncle Pat so she said is he Daddy or Mommy’s brother? I said no, he’s just Uncle Pat. He takes me out to movies and braids my hair and sleeps in Mommy and Daddy’s room.”
Patrick pursed his lips in that way of his that told Tashi he was holding back a laugh. She gave him a sharp kick to the ribs and he looked up looking like Julius fucking Caesar with a knife in his back.
What? he mouthed at her.
Dumbass, she mouthed back.
“And what did Miss Tyler say about that, Lils?” Art prompted when Lily got too invested tracing the faint surgery scar around Art’s thumb.
“She didn’t say anything for a while,” Lily said. “And that’s when she asked me if he was your boyfriend but that can’t be right, right? Because you’re already married. Married people don’t have boyfriends.”
Patrick dropped his hand from his mouth. He wasn’t laughing anymore.
He was looking at Tashi, but Tashi was looking at Art. Of the three of them, she thinks, her husband would be the last to know what to say to that. He’s the one who’s always making himself sick over labels—Tashi still remembers waking up one night when they just started dating to find Art staring at her, and having to reassure him, Yes, Art, this is real, I’m your girlfriend —but his rules have always been different whenever Patrick’s involved.
If Tashi had never found them, she guesses Art would have lived their whole lives telling people that Patrick Zweig was just his childhood friend, and Patrick would be too much of a damn coward to do anything but pout and then kill himself over it later.
But Tashi did find them, and now her daughter was asking what it was, exactly, that she found. Married people don’t have boyfriends, except they did sometimes, but Lily’s too young to explain that to. Was it easier for her to understand that Uncle Pat was just a really, really close friend of her parents? But Tashi didn’t want her daughter getting the wrong idea of what friendship looks like, because it sure as hell didn’t look like this .
So here the question was: who on earth was Patrick Zweig to them?
Art’s tennis partner. One of Tashi’s players. Art’s best friend. The thorn in Tashi’s side. Art’s oldest love. Tashi’s mirror and greatest gamble.
“So?” Lily asked, turning to look at Patrick. “What should I tell Miss Tyler?”
There was a second of silence—just a second, but it felt a hundred minutes longer. Tashi could tell Art was holding his breath, both of them waiting for Patrick’s answer. From the way he looked between them, it was clear he was waiting for them, too.
But when it was clear neither of them were going to speak, Patrick sat up with a sigh. Forcing a small smile on his face, he reached down to ruffle Lily’s hair and said, “I’m just your Uncle Pat, okay? Nothing more and nothing less. Miss Tyler doesn’t have to get it. What’s important is that you get it, don’t you?”
Lily gave him a solemn nod, and that was that. Tashi turned the TV back on, but none of them were in the mood for tennis anymore, so she let Lily switch to some saccharine cartoon about mermaids. Art held her through it, only stirring to laugh at Lily’s jokes or sweep her hair away from her face. Halfway through the show, Patrick drew his legs back from Tashi’s, and they sat in silence until the credits rolled.
Afterwards, after Tashi put Lily to sleep, she found them in the kitchen. It was clear an attempt at a conversation had been made and subsequently crashed and burned. Art was sitting on the counter and methodically peeling the tag off an unopened beer can, and Patrick was leaning against the refrigerator with his arms crossed. They didn’t even look up when Tashi entered the room.
Whatever they talked about, it had left them pissed off and miserable and unable to look each other in the eye, so Tashi said, “We don’t have to talk about it,” and they never did again.
But now the nurse is still staring at Tashi, pen tapping impatiently on her clipboard, and both of them have better things to do than unpack Tashi and Art’s convoluted history with Patrick Zweig.
“Mrs. Donaldson,” the nurse says. “I asked what your relationship is to Mr. Zweig.”
“Can’t you just tell me where they stuck him in? He’s not the fucking Pope.” Tashi knows the nurse doesn’t deserve her irritability—she’s only doing her job—but Tashi would bite the head off a saint at this point.
“She’s his emergency contact,” Art says abruptly. “If you look at the form—there. Under Tashi Duncan . That’s her number.”
“You could have just said so at the start,” the nurse mumbles, then checks her clipboard again. “Room 412. Private suite. You can take the elevator. Oh, and Mrs. Donaldson?”
Tashi turns around halfway down the hallway. “What now?”
“Please put your shoes on before you go.”
Tashi opens the door and finds Patrick on the bed, his leg in a cast. He’s looking out the window at the metal-gray London sky and doesn’t even turn around before saying, “They told me I tore a tendon.”
Tashi strides into the room, the broken clasps of her heels trailing across the linoleum, to snatch the clipboard pinned at the foot of Patrick’s bed. Art follows her in more slowly, coming to a stop by Patrick’s bedside table.
Tashi flips through the doctor’s notes and feels her blood run cold. “They recommended you for surgery.”
“Yu p, ” Patrick says, popping the p —trying to play it off, trying to be nonchalant because God forbid Patrick Zweig ever admits to being depressed. “They’re putting me under tonight.”
“That quickly?”
“They say if I wait, I’ll never step foot on a court again.” He shrugs, but the hands folded on his lap are gripping each other with the white-knuckled desperation of a sinner in church. “There’s still a big chance I won’t, no matter what they do or how fast they do it.”
Tashi tries to place the clipboard back but misses the hook once, twice, before she finally manages to keep herself calm enough to click it into place. “Did they tell you the odds?”
“The good ‘ol fifty-fifty,” Patrick says.
“That’s not too bad. I mean, we’ve worked with worse, haven’t we?” Art says, looking to Tashi for reassurance.
“But it was never all-or-nothing before, was it?” Patrick snaps, finally turning to face them. His eyes are red-rimmed, and he looks more exhausted than he did when Tashi made them run fifty laps while training for the US Open, but there’s something brewing in his eyes—something dark and nasty and merciless.
“You’re telling me about all-or-nothing, Zweig?” Tashi snaps back.
She knows she should keep a better leash on her temper, because there really is no point yelling at a man in a hospital bed, but she never was able to help herself with Patrick. They’re two mirrors pointed at each other, each emotion and mistake and sting of wounded pride amplified over and over and over between them, back and forth, like a never-ending tennis match.
It’s Art that has to break it up, taking Tashi by the wrist. She looks down at where his hand wraps around her, and at the angry red divots Tashi left on his knuckles in the backseat of the Uber.
He could have told her she was hurting him, but you could always count on Art Donaldson to suffer in silence. Or maybe it was because he didn’t even notice, too caught up in his own wild dread to pay any attention to Tashi’s nails carving through his skin.
It’s just like Patrick Zweig to make idiots out of both of them.
“Patrick,” Art says tiredly, still holding Tashi by the wrist, “could you stop being a dick for a second so we can figure out what to do?”
Patrick lets out a strained laugh. “What is there to figure out? We toss a coin. Heads, I never hold a racket again. Tails, I make it out of surgery, spend a year ambling back to recovery only to find out I could work all my life and still only be half as good as I was before I fucked it all to hell. You wanted my odds, Tashi? Those are my odds.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” Tashi says, leaning forward and hitching her knee up on Patrick’s bed so he has no choice but to look at her and only her. “I pulled Art back from the brink before. What makes you think I can’t do the same to you?”
It’s strange, what a few changes can do to a whole sentence.
What Tashi actually meant to say was, What makes you think I won’t do the same for you? And maybe if she said it like that, softened her words up for him, Patrick might have actually listened to her.
As it stands, Patrick isn’t backing down. Tashi didn’t expect him to. She knows, intimately, that Patrick always gives as good as he gets. It’s just really goddamn annoying when the person getting it is her .
“I told you before,” Patrick hisses. “I’m not Art.”
“Oh, I’m well aware,” Tashi spits back.
“Wouldn’t you love me better if I was, Tashi? If I was sweet and pliant and willing to bend over backwards and take all your bullshit with nothing but a Yes, ma’am ?”
Art’s hand tightens involuntarily around Tashi’s wrist. She glances back at him before he can completely hide the hurt in his expression, and that’s Tashi’s last straw.
The leash snaps.
“Who said anything about me loving you at all, Zweig?” she says, coldly, angrily, but she only gets a second to relish the pain that flashes across Patrick’s face before shame sets in.
Shame and something that tastes awfully like regret.
“Tashi,” Art says behind her. And Tashi thinks he sounds a bit angry, but that’s impossible—Art’s never angry, not at her. “That’s enough.”
“Oh, so the dog speaks,” Patrick says savagely.
“You’re out of fucking line, Zweig,” Tashi snaps. “What the hell’s gotten into you?”
“He wants us to hate him first so he won’t feel as bad for hating us back,” Art says.
The room gets deadly quiet.
Outside, Tashi can hear nurses’ shoes squeaking down the hallway and a scratchy voice over the intercom announcing an emergency in another ward but says nothing of the emergency happening in Room 412.
“I mean,” Art says after a minute—after a lifetime, “isn’t that what you’re doing? Picking a fight to get us to leave so you can wave your hand and say, See? Told you they would.”
“You think you know me so well, do you?” There’s a bitterness in Patrick that sours the whole room for Tashi, and she feels like she should throw the windows open to let fresh air smother it. An apt metaphor for him, she reckons. Patrick Zweig: the perpetual gas leak. “I’m just showing you the door you used to leave through before, you know.”
“Is that what this is?” Tashi says, clenching her fists. “You’re throwing a hissy fit now because, what, I didn’t marry you ten years ago? Because Art didn’t pick up your calls?”
“Because I have no idea what I am to you if I don’t have tennis, Tashi,” Patrick yells, sitting up to throw the words in her face. “And I thought I would have a few more years before I had to answer that question, but I’m staring down the barrel of the fucking gun now.” He sinks back down onto his pillows, the fire going out of him all at once like a marionette with its strings abruptly cut. He stares up at the ceiling, his eyes unseeing, and lets out a small, bitter laugh. “Though I guess you just pulled the trigger for me, so I don’t have to worry about that anymore.”
Tashi steps back.
Her feet are grass-stained and a bit bruised from running through grass and sidewalk asphalt and hospital linoleum for him. The nurse is asking her again, What is your relation to the patient, Mrs. Donaldson? and Tashi wants to gesture at her feet for the answer.
But she can’t say that, not to him. Not with everything she knows.
Art lets out a frustrated breath and runs a trembling hand down his face. “You live with us,” he says slowly. “You eat at our table. We let you near our daughter . Wasn’t that enough of an answer for you?”
“That isn’t much of an answer,” Patrick says numbly. “Do you expect me to live off scraps forever? You didn’t even answer when Lily asked. So which is it, Mr. and Mrs. Donaldson, am I your boyfriend or just another tennis player you can renegotiate a contract with when I’m no longer useful?”
Tashi closes her eyes. Breathes out. Tries to unclench her fists.
She thinks she would very much like to set this room on fire.
“Is that what you want to be?” she asks instead. She keeps her voice level, business-like. If Patrick wants a renegotiation, she’ll give him one. “Our boyfriend? Like we’re back in fucking high school?”
“Yeah,” Patrick says with complete sincerity. “Let’s be seventeen again.”
“Pat,” Art says slowly. “You know you mean more to us than that.”
“Do I know that, Art? Do I? Because I’m pretty sure your wife just said she doesn’t love me—hell, maybe she never even liked me. Maybe I was just the stray she let sleep in her bed only because you were the one that brought me in.”
“Don’t put words in my mouth, Zweig,” Tashi says through gritted teeth.
“Well, someone has to, and it’s clear it was never going to be you,” Patrick says sharply. “You’ve skirted so gracefully around the Patrick of it all for, fuck, two years now. Two years of dodging definitions and not talking about it . Two years of you having one foot out of the door.”
“Like you’re one to talk,” Tashi says furiously. And it feels good to be this angry. It feels good to finally, finally stop pulling her punches. “Go on, Patrick. Do what you do best and open your fucking mouth to tell Art about Palm Springs.”
Patrick flinches and, at least, has the decency to look guilty. “You knew about that?”
His voice is suddenly small, and his eyes dart to Art like a deer caught in the headlights.
“Don’t be dumb,” Tashi says, crossing her arms. “Of course I knew. I know everything about you. It wasn’t hard.” Tashi tilts her head at him, condescending and petty and wanting to hurt him as much as he hurt her. “Or did you think you could hide a whole apartment from me forever?”
Beside her, Art goes still.
“Art,” Patrick says, all the edge bleeding out of his voice. “It’s not what you think—”
“How the hell would you know what I think, Patrick?” Art says. There’s no anger in his voice. No sadness or disappointment. There’s nothing at all.
Tashi has a feeling that if his leg wasn’t in a cast right now, Patrick would be running for the hills.
“You were smart, I’ll give you that,” she says. “A small, unassuming one-bedroom in a different city, an hour away from the nearest tennis court. Nobody would suspect a thing. Except you went a step too far with the fake name. I mean, really, Patrick Z. Duncan? I thought you didn’t want to be Mr. Tashi Duncan, but here we are anyway.” She narrows her eyes at him. “That’s how I found out, you know. Someone saw your name on the directory and sent a tip to the bloodhounds at TMZ, who got a hold of a copy of your lease. Imagine being me, Patrick. Imagine getting a call to confirm if I was hiding a secret marriage with you in Palm fucking Springs. Imagine driving out to confirm with your own two eyes that the guy that’s been living with you and your daughter for two goddamn years has actually been keeping a place of his own the entire time.”
“How long?” Patrick asks bleakly. “How long have you known?”
“A year,” Tashi says.
“You’ve been pissed off at me for a year?”
“Didn’t I hide it so fucking well, Mr. Duncan?”
“Could you two,” Art says, “shut the hell up and let me fucking think?”
Tashi has more than a hundred nasty things left to sling, but she shuts her mouth. Patrick does the same, looking back out the window as if something out in the London skyline could save him.
Art breathes out, long and hard, before throwing himself into the sofa beside Patrick’s bed. He leans forward and puts his face in his hands, and Tashi’s torn between leaving and putting Art back together.
In the end, she stays by Patrick’s bed, her arms wrapped around herself, looking at nothing.
After a while, Art says, “Did you fuck anyone there?”
Patrick jerks. “What?”
“He’s asking if you cheated on us,” Tashi says.
“Is it cheating if we never figured out if we were exclusive or not?” Patrick muses, and Tashi kind of wants to bash his head in for that.
“Did you,” Art repeats, “or did you not fuck anyone in Palm Springs, Patrick?”
“Would you forgive me if I did, like you forgave Tashi?”
“That was different.”
“How can it be different —”
“Because she was fucking you, not some random fucking stranger you fished up from Tinder,” Art says viciously. “Answer the goddamn question, Patrick.”
“No,” Patrick says. “No, of course not. I was hardly even there. I’m always with you, remember?”
“Then why keep it at all, Patrick?” Art asks. “So you have somewhere to fly to when you finally get sick of playing house?”
“So I have somewhere to crash in when you get sick of me,” Patrick says. “God, are you really going to make me say it first?” He takes a deep breath, like he’s preparing to scream but when finally speaks, his voice is uncharacteristically soft. When Patrick Zweig breaks, it isn’t with a shout. It’s a whisper. “I love you. I’m fucking in love with you, with both of you, and I want to be your boyfriend or your dog or whatever you want to call me. I did want to marry you ten years ago, Tashi, and I did want you to call me back, Art. I still do. I’m still waiting for that call.”
Art looks up, first to Tashi, then to Patrick.
Art started growing his hair out a year ago, and now it’s almost back to the soft, near-cherubic curls he had when they first met. But there’s a hardness in him now that he never had at seventeen—a fierceness like an uninhabitable tundra.
It’s there in the set of his shoulders and the shape of his jaw. It’s in the way he swings a racket and the way he steps on court when he knows he’s going to win. It’s in the way he says Tashi’s name and the way he looks at Patrick now.
This is what most people forget: ice can burn, too.
“I’m calling, Patrick,” Art says simply. “So pick up the fucking phone.”
“No,” Patrick says, voice jagged. “I don’t want to—not until I know you’ll still want me around if I can’t swing a racket anymore.”
Art stands and slowly makes his way back to Patrick’s bed. His hands clench and unclench at his sides. Patrick looks up at him, managing to still look defiant with a shattered knee and a pale blue hospital gown.
“You left me before,” Patrick continues. “How can I know you won’t do it again?”
“I guess you’ll just have to trust me,” Art says. “Do you trust me?”
“I’ve been trusting you my whole life, Art,” Patrick replies.
Art reaches down and ruffles Patrick’s hair. Patrick tries to turn away, boyishly bashful, but Art grabs his jaw and Patrick turns to rest his mouth lightly against Art’s thumb, and it’s that easy for them. It’s that damn easy, because they’ve been forgiving each other for shit since the day they met, but Tashi’s not like that. She’s never been like that.
She was taught to ball her grudges up in her fists and squeeze until they stop wriggling. She keeps her anger close to her always because it fuels her, because it’s easier than dealing with it, because if she lets it slip out into the world, she ends up doing something stupid like telling Art she’ll leave him if he loses and telling Patrick she doesn’t love him.
Anger is easy for Art and Patrick. They get to let it out on court, to smash rackets and other people’s faces and call it a day. But Tashi’s anger is the uglier kind. The kind that’s scrappy and desperate because it’s backed into the corner. The kind with nowhere else to go and no other choice to make but to bite and bite hard .
The night she found out about Patrick’s Palm Springs apartment, she’d gone to a bar in the city. There was no one there but her, the bartender, and a guy in a three-piece suit who offered to buy her drinks for her. Three shots in, he leaned forward and asked her if she wanted to go up to his hotel room.
Tashi said yes.
Because she was tipsy and furious. Because she wanted to punish Patrick. Because she wanted to see the look on his face when she used it against him.
But then in the elevator, with the man’s hand at the small of her back, Tashi thought suddenly, ferociously, No .
Art was right; cheating with Patrick was not the same as cheating with someone else. Art wouldn’t forgive her for this. Neither of them could.
She tried telling herself that it didn’t matter what Patrick thought of her, because she owed him fuck-all, but it tasted like a lie even while she was thinking it.
So Tashi got off on the next floor and left without saying another word. The man called after her. She didn’t turn around. She just got back in her car and drove all the way home.
She found them in their bed, tangled up together, Patrick’s head tucked into the crook of Art’s shoulder, Art’s arm slung around Patrick’s waist. She sat on the edge of the bed for a long while, just watching them breathe slowly in and out, synchronized even in sleep.
She slowly traced the curve of Patrick’s jaw with her knuckles.
“You fucking piece of shit,” she said.
And then she climbed in beside him and fell asleep with her head against his chest, counting his heartbeats instead of sheep.
That was how she knew she was fucked.
So, yes, she’s been angry at Patrick Zweig for a year. She’s also been in love with him for a year—longer than that, even. She hates him and wants to be him and loves him. How did he expect her to contain all that in a single word?
Patrick and Art are looking at her, expectant. Patrick looks like he’s holding his breath.
“Tash,” Patrick says, “please.”
Slowly, Tashi uncurls her fists.
She moves to sit at the edge of Patrick’s bed like she did all those months ago. He follows her with bleak, blue eyes.
For a moment, she only stares down at her own hands. Then, without looking at either of them, she says, “Get rid of the fucking apartment, Patrick.”
Patrick looks at her like she just gave him the stars on a string.
And Tashi does soften, then, finally. She scoots further up the bed and rests her head on Patrick’s chest, careful to not jostle his knee, and his arm goes around her waist to hold her against him. His heartbeat is a stutter and a scream under her.
Patrick kisses the top of her head.
“I don’t want to lose tennis, Tash,” he says, his voice thick with emotion. “I can’t . But if I have to, I can’t lose you along with it, okay? It’ll—It’ll actually kill me, I think.”
“You’re not losing me,” Tashi says.
“You say that, but—”
“You’re not losing me,” Tashi says, more forcefully. “Neither of you will be losing me. That’s not how we do things around here. It’s all or nothing, and I’m never going to settle for nothing. So I’m all-in. Heads or tails, I’m all-in.”
Hours later, the doctors find them together, Tashi curled up at Patrick’s side, Art in a chair he dragged right up to the bed so he could nap with his head cushioned by Tashi’s arm. The nurse has to shake Art awake while they brief Tashi on the operation.
She gets called Mrs. Zweig the entire time. No one corrects them.
They move Patrick on to a gurney, and Art and Tashi hold his hands right up until the operating room doors.
“I’ll see you on the other side?” Patrick asks, hopefully, like there could be any other answer to that but yes .
Ten months and three weeks later, Tashi sits in the stands and watches Patrick and Art do their warm-ups by the courtside. Art’s hair is longer, Patrick has a scar on his left knee to match Tashi’s, and Tashi’s wearing new shoes that Patrick got as an apology for Palm Springs.
Lily’s next to her, sipping on a lemonade through a pink, heart-shaped straw.
Art looks up from where he’s holding Patrick’s legs down, and finds his wife and daughter in the stands. He gives them a wave then elbows Patrick out of his twelfth sit-up to point them out. Patrick squints until he finds them, and when he does, he beams like the sun.
Love you, he mouths.
Dumbass, she mouths back.
Patrick’s grin only widens, and then Art’s pulling him up as the umpire announces the start of the championship game between MENDEZ-YU and DONALDSON-ZWEIG.
Art and Patrick take their places, side-by-side, like they always are. Tashi watches them on the edge of her seat, like she always does.
The whistle blows, and the game finally begins.