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Sacramento—August 2010
When the headlights come at him, Patrick Zweig’s life flashes before his eyes and he has time to think, Dear God, was I that fucking boring? before the semi slams into his car.
Later—much later, after nursing a mild concussion, several lightly bruised ribs and a bad cut from hitting his head against the steering wheel—they will tell him it wasn’t his fault. The truck driver had fallen asleep on his way back from some tampon factory in Tampa. Patrick will learn to laugh about that later: first at the mere existence of a Tampa-based tampon factory; secondly, at how easily his death-by-tampon-truck would have overshadowed the middling tennis career he spent most of his life cultivating, and all that will be on his tombstone is Patrick Zweig, killed by Tampa Tampon Truck .
They will tell him he was lucky to survive. They will tell him he swerved just in time. A millisecond later, they would have been collecting him off the road in separate bags.
Of course, as it’s happening, Patrick doesn’t know any of that.
All he knows is that he’s had one drink too many because that afternoon, he bombed a match at the last possible moment, like he always does. He knows, as the truck is coming at him, that he should turn the wheel now, now, fucking now, Zweig! but the voice shouting it into his ear doesn’t belong to him. The voice that does is still back on that challenger court, listing all the things he did wrong.
A flunked serve there. A spineless return that his opponent—some bottle-blond upstart with a nasty mouth and a nastier forehand—smashed right back at him. Too much power behind his backhand, too little behind his slice, and there goes the set, there goes the whole match, there goes having something to eat next week.
Next week.
He’s not going to make it to next week, is he?
So it’s the second before he dies and there’s nothing but light in his eyes and this was just supposed to be another late-night run for cigarettes before returning to his shitty two-star motel with the busted A/C and the crappy moth-ravaged carpet and the empty twin bed and the afternoon’s loss and the loss before that and the loss— Are my final thoughts really going to be about fucking tennis?
That, more than anything—more than the thought of his mother having to identify him by pieces, more than the thought of ending up on the news as Tennis Pro Hit By Semi, Dragged Three Blocks Before Dying, Authorities Say or, worse, not ending up on the news at all —is what gets his hands to tighten on the steering wheel.
He swerves.
There’s the screech of the tires and the crunch of metal and the thud of head against wheel as his car flies off the road and careens into the trees. He tastes blood in his mouth and the remnants of his ill-advised tequila shot.
And then, all at once, abruptly, he tastes nothing at all.
Montpelier—March 2023
“This is the worst night of my life. Bar fucking none.”
“Don’t be such a drama queen, Zweig,” Tashi says.
“No, it is,” Patrick insists. “I’d rather be doing anything. Ask me to do literally anything else, Tashi.”
“Okay,” she says, sizing him up. “We can go have dinner with my parents, how about that?”
He glares at her, but really it’s just an excuse to look at her in that insanely hot green dress she’s only wearing because he begged her to. Actually begged her. On his fucking knees and everything, because if he’s going to die tonight, at the very least he’s going to die ha—
“Stop ogling my wife, you fucking creep,” Art says, stepping up behind him and slapping him up the head.
“Can you blame me, though?” Patrick says, making a show of rubbing the back of his head just to see Tashi smile. And she does, albeit begrudgingly. “You have a hot ass wife, Donaldson. I mean, God, look at her. ”
Tashi ignores him and moves forward to give Art a small kiss. “Did you park okay?” she asks, stepping back but not fully leaving Art’s space. “You were gone for a while.”
“Had to park down the block,” Art says, also lingering in Tashi’s orbit. He’s looking down at her and smiling in that soft way he only gets with her and Lily and, when he deserves it, Patrick. “Got stopped by a few kids who recognized me, though. Had to make sure they were really gone before making my way back here.”
“Good thinking.”
“I have my moments.”
Tashi smiles. “So you do.”
She’s doing that thing she does, fixing up Art’s hair and brushing invisible dust from his suit, finding any little reason to touch him. Art notices and catches her hand as she’s drawing away so he can lace their fingers together more firmly.
Tashi tips her head up, expectant, and they kiss again—longer this time. Patrick knows he’s not the only one who finds Tashi irresistible in that green dress, because Art was down on his knees right next to him when Tashi was putting it on. He sees Art’s hands wander the same curves and dips he’s been aching to explore all night; Tashi responds, in turn, by sinking her fingers into Art’s hair and mussing up her own handiwork.
Patrick would remind them they aren’t teenagers anymore, they’re an old married couple in their thirties—dinosaur age, in tennis terms, far too old to be sucking face in public like this—and could they not do this right in front of his salad? But the truth is he likes watching. Sometimes, even more than he likes participating. Emphasis on some times, though. He’s not that much of a martyr.
He could watch them like this forever—Tashi, resplendent, and Art so needy he’s chasing her every time she draws back for a breath of air—but someone has to be the responsible one and get them to their reservation on time. Usually, Patrick would be up for arriving unfashionably late in exchange for a back-alley tumble, but Mr. and Mrs. Robert Zweig do not take kindly to being made to wait.
On another night, Patrick really wouldn’t care about pissing his parents off. But he figured arriving on time is the least he can do before giving them matching heart attacks.
After all, it’s not every day your son tells you he’s got a girlfriend and a boyfriend and they’re married to each other and , also, Mom and Dad, you may or may not have a granddaughter, but you’ll have to be cool about dying without ever knowing because I’d rather take arsenic than a paternity test.
“Okay, lovebirds, that’s enough,” he says, pulling Art by the collar of his suit jacket. Art stumbles backward, looking more than a little kiss-bruised and star-struck, so Patrick wraps his arm around his waist to keep him steady and—yes—just for the hell of having Art Donaldson on his arm. “It’s time to face the music. Or the firing squad, more like.”
Tashi stands with her arms crossed and, God, she has to know what she looks like doing that in that dress, right?
She smirks at the look on Patrick’s face.
Yeah, Patrick says to himself, tightening his hold on Art and smirking back, she knows .
“We don’t have to do this, you know,” she says, her voice unexpectedly gentle.
It’s not the first time one of them’s given him an out. Art did multiple times on the ride over, offering to turn the car around and just spend the night in their hotel room watching Paw Patrol with Lily and Tashi’s mom. Even weeks before, when Patrick first brought up the idea, Tashi was telling him he didn’t have to do this, he didn’t owe his parents any answers about where he’s been and especially not about who he's been with .
Except that his dad’s getting up there in age, his mom’s losing more and more of herself with every phone call he spares her, and for all their faults, they were still his parents.
So Patrick tells Tashi the same thing he told her three weeks ago.
“I know. But they deserve to know I’m—happy.”
He meant to say doing well for myself. He meant to say alive, alert, awake, enthusiastic. He didn’t mean to sound so terribly, pathetically sincere, but maybe Art’s rubbing off on him, or maybe Patrick’s always been the most honest of the three of them and the only difference is that he has something good to be honest about for a change.
“Save the corny shit for the Hallmark movie, Zweig,” Tashi says, but her eyes are soft.
“Seriously, though,” Art says, “I think it’ll actually kill your dad if we go in together. Can’t we do it one by one?”
“You want to, like, microdose my parents on the concept of three-ways?”
“Don’t be disgusting,” Tashi says. But then, after a beat, she seems to actually seriously consider it. “Who would be less stroke-inducing to bring out first: me or Art?”
“Definitely Art,” Patrick says. “They kind of already expected it anyway.”
Art snorts. “Oh, I’m sure that particular betting pool’s old enough to vote.”
“Who in their right mind would be betting against you?”
“Are you kidding? Your mom’s had it out for me since you told her it was my pot she found in your Phys. Ed. notebook. As if I’m the bad influence in this relationship.”
“Aren’t you, though?” Patrick pulls Art closer, and their smiles turn dangerous.
Patrick loves it, this edge in their conversations. How it feels like he’s straddling a knife every time he opens his mouth around Art. Like they’re always one word away from kissing each other or killing each other. It’s the same with Tashi, too. Every day with them is a fight for his life and Patrick really, really loves it.
His voice low and his face an inch away from Art’s, he continues, “You think you got everyone fooled because of your pretty face, but I see right through you, Donaldson. I see you for the manipulative little shit-stirrer you really are.”
“Aw,” says Art, completely deadpan. “You think I’m pretty?”
Patrick grins. “Pretty in the same way poisonous frogs are pretty.”
“I think you missed your calling as a poet, Pat,” Art says with a twist to his mouth that Patrick wants to lick off him. “Look at me, I’m positively swooning. I might just be falling in love with you all over again.”
Patrick grabs Art’s periwinkle tie and loops it around his hand twice to tug Art closer to him. Art’s eyes flash with a warning to not start what he can’t finish, but Patrick’s having a hard time recalling why on earth he was in such a hurry in the first place—until Tashi digs a knuckle between his ribs, and he springs away from Art with a yelp.
“Yeah, there’s no way in hell I’m letting you into that restaurant by yourselves when you’re drooling over each other like this,” Tashi says.
“You were just draped over him two seconds ago ,” Patrick accuses.
“It was a moment of weakness,” Tashi says, reaching over to swipe a lipstick stain from the corner of Art’s mouth, and then doing the same to where it rubbed off on Patrick’s cheek. “Pull yourselves together and I might— might —just consider keeping this dress on for later.”
That sobers them up quickly.
The three of them fumble around for a few seconds more on the sidewalk: righting each other’s hair, fixing Art’s lapels, tucking Patrick’s shirt back into his pants. And when they finally run out of excuses to put it off, they turn towards the door.
Patrick takes a long, shuddering breath.
“We go in together,” says Art, “or not at all.”
“Hallmark line,” Tashi says. “We should keep a running list.”
“I want to kill myself,” Patrick says, his stomach churning like he’s a kid again with a tennis racket inside the house like he’s been warned not to do, and his mother’s broken vase shoved under a rug somewhere.
“We know, Patrick.”
“I’d rather be gargling broken glass. Or getting my knee snapped again.”
“We know , Patrick.”
“I wouldn’t even be doing this if it was with anybody else,” he says.
Standing on either side of him, Art and Tashi share a glance. And then Art slings an arm around his shoulders and Tashi slips her hand into his. Patrick steadies.
“We know, Patrick.”
“Okay,” Patrick says, exhaling. “Let’s just get this fucking over with.”
But when they push into the restaurant, the three of them in perfect step, Patrick feels strangely light.
Sacramento—August 2010
Hell, Patrick thinks, smells a bit like chlorine and cheap coffee. No. Hold on. It smells exactly like chlorine and cheap coffee and—hand sanitizer? Before he can decide if his eternal punishment really is to relive the pool party where Richard “Dick” Walton pulled his swimming trunks down in front of their entire sixth-grade class, Patrick opens his eyes.
He sees white and thinks, Heaven? And then he feels the cheap cotton of the blanket they laid over him and realizes, Oh. Hospital.
It must be a slow night, because the entire emergency room is empty except for a nurse slowly nodding off at his desk and a guy sitting on a gurney parked directly across Patrick, holding an ice pack to his blackened eye. The guy narrows his one good eye at him and then says loudly, “Nurse! Guy from the crash is conscious.”
The crash.
All at once, Patrick remembers. The truck. His car. A tree coming straight at him in the dark. He sits up and nearly throws up, but it doesn’t fucking matter, none of it matters if his legs—
He yanks the blanket from his legs. Bends them at the knees. Wriggles his toes and rolls his ankles. They ache a bit, but that's about it. It’s only when he’s sure that his arms are in working order too that Patrick falls back against the stiff pillows with a shaky sigh of relief.
His legs are fine. His arms still work.
He can still play.
“Mr. Zweig?”
Patrick looks up. The nurse from the desk is hovering over him, still blinking the drowsiness from his eyes. He’s tapping his pen against his clipboard, and the insistent click-click-click makes Patrick feel like his head’s splitting open. He reaches up and finds bandages over his temple, which explains why every little sound makes him want to grab the nurse’s pen and snap it in half.
“I’m glad to see you awake,” the nurse continues, sounding vaguely bored about the whole affair. Then he rattles off all the things Patrick broke when his car clipped a sycamore tree, how the other driver was fine, just shaken up, and how it’s recommended Patrick stay for the night so they can monitor his head injury.
“No, fuck,” Patrick says, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand. “I gotta—I’m supposed to leave for Fremont tomorrow. Or, shit, today I guess. I’m a tennis player, see—”
“Good for you,” the nurse says dryly, still consulting his clipboard.
“—and I have a tournament to sign up for in eight hours,” Patrick continues. “So if you could just…” He snaps his fingers at the nurse, which finally gets his attention. Although judging from the glare he gives Patrick, it’s not the kind of attention that’ll get him any favors. “If you could just give me my lollipop for being a good little boy and send me on my merry way, that’ll be terrific.”
“As much as it would be my absolute pleasure to send you off,” the nurse says, “letting a guy with a concussion just wander out into the streets is not really a good look for us. Besides,” he adds, looking down at his damn clipboard again, “we still need your insurance details, for the bill.”
Patrick stares at him for a long while until the nurse is forced to look back up at him. Patrick clears his throat and shifts uneasily on his bed.
“Hypothetically,” he begins, “if one doesn’t, uh, have insurance, per se, what would one be looking at here?”
The nurse’s eyebrow curves upward. “Aren’t tennis players supposed to be, like, millionaires?”
“Only the sellouts,” Patrick says with a grin.
The nurse stares back, unimpressed. Well. His loss.
“Hypothetically,” the nurse says, “one would be looking at around two and a half grand.”
Patrick nods.
“I see,” he says.
He’s absolutely fucked, but nobody else needs to know that.
The nurse lingers at his bedside for a few seconds, and he must see right through Patrick, because his expression slowly softens with pity. Which Patrick can’t fucking stomach. He’d rather have the apathy back. He’d take anything over how the nurse is looking at him now—like he’s some kind of damn charity case.
“Look,” the nurse says, unbearably sympathetic. “Your emergency contact’s on the way, so maybe you can split the bill between you two.”
Patrick straightens. “My emergency contact?”
“Yeah. We got your name off your license and luckily your files were still in the system from when you—” Clipboard. Pen. Click. Click. Click. “—had to get your stomach pumped back in ‘05. So we just called the contact you put down for that.”
Patrick remembers that night. September 2005. Queens. He just got knocked out of the Juniors bracket by Gabriel Mendez and his quick fucking feet, so he hit the city angry and itching for bad ideas. On the way back to the hotel, he bribed his cabbie to stop and pick up some booze, and four hours later, he was jumping on his hotel room bed with a half-full bottle of Smirnoff, trying to see how high he could go, and someone was laughing at him across the room, and he remembers trying to do a backflip just to hear that laugh again.
He tripped over his own legs and fell head-first against the wall.
The person he was sharing the room with took him to the hospital, some seedy little place busy enough to not ask too many questions about why a sixteen-year-old was vomiting up vodka and why another sixteen-year-old was putting himself down as his emergency contact.
Patrick never changed it.
Why the hell did he never change it?
“Hey,” he calls weakly after the nurse, who had started to wander back to his desk, “what did Art Donaldson say when you called?”
The nurse turns around with a frown. “I don’t know,” he says. “It was his wife who picked up.”
San Francisco—August 2021
When Art takes the court, Lily stands up on the couch and says, “Look! There’s Daddy!”
She starts giggling and jumping around, so Patrick grabs on to the back of her T-shirt to make sure she doesn’t accidentally go over and hit her head on the coffee table. He would have moved it in preparation for Lily’s trademark intensity, but he had to have somewhere to prop his leg against.
The damn cast is the only reason he’s here, wasting away in California instead of in New York with Art and Tashi. The doctors have told him he could take it off any day now, but Tashi didn’t want to take any chances. Art didn’t, either, so Patrick’s suggestion of just sitting on the floor of their private jet, leg outstretched the whole six-hour trip to Teterboro Airport, was effectively out-voted, 2-to-1. It’s a hard-won democracy the three of them have, at least until Tashi’s the one getting vetoed, in which case she turns it into a dictatorship.
“I’m your coach ,” she would say, arms crossed, eyebrow cocked and ready to fire. “So if I say we’re vacationing in Rome, Italy instead of Middle-Of-Nowhere, Florida, we’re going to fucking Rome, Italy.”
To be fair to her, Patrick did enjoy the Rome trip, but only until he realized Tashi only chose it for the nice view she can indulge in while making Art and Patrick run laps around the Colosseum at four in the morning.
“We’ll be back before you know it,” Art promised the day they left for New York without him.
“Yeah, yeah,” Patrick replied, waving a dismissive hand. “Enjoy throwing yourself at men ten years younger than you, Donaldson.”
“You’re only mad you’re not throwing yourself at them with me,” Art said with a smirk, which Patrick was not in the mood to return. So Art dropped it. “Hey. Trust me, this time next year, you’ll be back to getting your ass handed to you by nineteen-year-olds fresh out of the academy.”
“Yeah,” Patrick repeated after a beat. “Sure. Now go kiss your daughter goodbye and get the hell out of here.”
He didn’t want to say what he really wanted to say—because he didn’t want to psych Art out right before the Open—but since Patrick fucked his knee two months ago, he’d secretly wished Art stopped playing, too. Of course, it was a fucking selfish thing to say, and Patrick’s been trying real fucking hard to only be a dick when he needed to be, so he never said it out loud.
It’s just that watching Art play like this—on a couch in San Francisco instead of in the stands, instead of on the court with him—feels a bit like trying to breathe with punctured lungs. Patrick’s not stupid (“Debatable,” Tashi’s voice says in his head, albeit with less bite than it would have had two years ago); he knows he only has a handful of years left in the sport. He and Art are pushing their luck by still doing this shit at thirty-three when the average retirement age is twenty-seven.
One of the commentators at their last Doubles match—the one before Patrick’s ill-fated solo Slam run—had called it a miracle that they were holding their own so well when, just the year before, everyone thought Art was bound for retirement and nobody thought about Patrick at all.
“It’s not a miracle, John,” his co-commentator had replied. “It’s Tashi Donaldson.”
And as if he conjured her through sheer will alone, the camera shifts to Tashi in the stands, and Lily starts pointing at the flat-screen again as if Patrick could ever miss her. She’s wearing a sleek white dress and silver sunglasses, and it’s like looking at a beacon of light in a sea of nobodies. She’s looking straight ahead without acknowledging the camera, not taking her eyes off Art and the court for even a second.
Patrick leans back on the couch and feels a hundred times more miserable.
He’d never ask Art to stop, not in a thousand years, but these past few months have been a grim preview of a future where he burns out faster and Art keeps going without him. He used to dread the opposite, but now with his knee, and with Art playing so well even two thousand miles away—
Lily gasps beside him. “It’s starting,” she breathes out, and finally collapses against him.
As Art takes first serve, Patrick finds himself watching Lily instead.
She’s curled up at his side, her attention on the game unwavering. She’s so much like her mother like this—mouth half-open, barely blinking—that it almost makes Patrick laugh. Instead, he just wraps his arm around Lily’s shoulders and pulls her tighter against him.
One upside to being benched, he supposes, is getting to spend more time with Lily. In the past week alone, they’ve all but exhausted every piece of mermaid-related cartoon on Netflix and moved on to anything with a princess in it, and Patrick hasn’t hated it as much as he thought he would. In fact, he hasn’t hated it at all.
It’s the longest they’ve been left alone together, and Patrick knew by the look on Tashi’s face before she left that this is supposed to be a test. Patrick doesn’t think he’s failing. He hasn’t raised his voice or forgotten that, ironically, she’s allergic to fish, nor has he done anything Lily would have to unpack with a therapist in twenty years, like accidentally calling her by the family dog’s name.
(Which his own father did. Twice. Not that awful compared to other parental screw-ups, but still a reason not to call home as often as his mother would like.)
Despite all that, he doesn’t think he’s passing with flying colors, either. Though it’s not like he ever intended to. He’s not the fatherly type; that’s always been Art’s dream, never his. It was hard to imagine anything close to settling down when he was living out of his car and only dating for a roof over his head. Marriage, kids, a white-picket-fence life—guys like him just aren’t built for that.
So he’s more than willing to let Art keep being Daddy Art while he stays Uncle Pat, even if there’s a slim chance it should be the other way around.
Things are perfectly fine the way they are. There’s not one reason to change a single thing about the life they have now.
“Daddy got it!” Lily says suddenly, eyes widening. “The ball was in! I saw! Did you see it too, Dad?”
Lily keeps going, calling the umpire creative insults that could not be repeated to her mother, and asking Patrick again if he agrees that the point was clearly Art’s—but for the first time since he was seven years old, Patrick does not give a single fuck about tennis.
It was a mistake. A slip of the tongue. An easy one to make. She was watching her dad on the TV, it doesn’t take a lot to get wires crossed, and it was a mistake.
Lily keeps watching the match, her small head resting against Patrick’s chest, and he wonders if she noticed he stopped breathing. Slowly, carefully, he combs his fingers through her hair. She lets him. Patrick’s fingers tremble the whole way through.
“Hey, little shark?” he says after a whole set has passed.
She doesn’t take her eyes off the TV. “Yeah?”
“Did you mean to call me ‘dad’ back there?”
“Yeah,” she says in that simple, matter-of-fact, what’s-the-big-deal way only kids are capable of. “Mommy and Daddy said I could.”
Those two. He doesn’t know if he’s more pissed off or impressed that they managed to keep that particular conversation away from him, when he’s been surgically attached to at least one of them all summer.
“Did they say you could,” Patrick asks slowly, “or that you should?”
“That I could,” Lily says, “but only if I wanted to.”
“And why do you want to?”
And a nine-year-old shouldn’t have the power to terrify him like this, but she does. She might as well be holding a loaded gun against his head.
He doesn’t know what answer he’s expecting. He doesn’t know what answer he even wants . Because he’s not supposed to want this. Domesticity, sitting on the couch on US Open weekend, World’s Best Dad coffee mugs—that was where tennis careers went to die, and Patrick’s not ready to die yet.
Except he finds himself leaning forward—mouth half-open, barely blinking, damn it, Tashi’s rubbed off on him or maybe it’s Lily—and waiting breathlessly for whatever Lily has to say.
“Because ‘Dad’s easier to say and ‘Uncle Pat’ was starting to sound a bit stupid,” Lily says. “Can we go back to watching the game now?”
Patrick laughs. His lungs are full of air again.
“Yeah,” he says, kissing the top of Lily’s head. “Let’s watch your Daddy obliterate these losers.”
In the end, Art gets knocked out of the semifinals by a twenty-something from Poughkeepsie who rubs more salt into the wound by telling the post-match interviewers that Art Donaldson was his idol while he was growing up. Art and Tashi don’t stay to watch the finals like they usually would. They get home the very same night.
Patrick’s waiting for them in the foyer, even though it’s almost midnight and he has an early appointment with his physical therapist tomorrow.
Art grins at him as he drops their bags by the door and Tashi wrestles with the locks behind him. “Okay, fine, you get one ‘I told you so’ but at least I didn’t get my ass kicked by a teenager . And, hey, it’s been a while since I’ve even played Singles so cut me some slack—”
“Did you tell Lily to call me dad?”
The grin drops from Art’s face. Tashi finally manages to lock the door, but continues standing there with her back to them.
“Well,” Art starts awkwardly after a long pause, “I mean, it’s kinda what we agreed on, isn’t it? After Wimbledon—”
“I don’t remember saying anything about wanting a Father’s Day card, Art.”
“You said you wanted this. Wanted us,” Art says, looking at Patrick with steel in his eyes. “And Lily’s part of that deal. It’s non-negotiable.”
Patrick’s hands tighten on his crutches. “And you two thought it would be just fucking perfect to go behind my back and let her ambush me with it on a random Thursday afternoon? What gave you that smart idea? You both fucked off to New York, knowing fully well you locked me in here with a ticking time bomb.”
Art draws himself up to his full height, eye-to-eye with Patrick, and Christ, when did that happen? When did the boy who Patrick chased down the halls of Mark Rebellato Tennis Academy turn into this wall of solid muscle and paternal instinct?
While Patrick was dicking about in the lower circuits and waking up next to a new body in a new city every night, Art Donaldson grew up. And he’s still growing up. Still getting better, still pushing himself with or without Patrick there. Meanwhile, Patrick’s stuck in survival mode, still thinking like that twenty-five-year-old trading cigarettes for a couch to sleep in. Still sneaking in baths in public toilets, and flipping a coin between gas, food or the next challenger’s registration fee. Still waking up some nights reaching for his shoes before remembering he actually means to stay this time.
“If you don’t want to be in her life like that,” Art says icily, “then don’t . Go back to being her Uncle Pat or whatever you want to be, but I’m telling you now that if you repeat this shit to my daughter’s face and break her heart, you’ll be fucking dead to me.”
“Art,” Tashi says.
Art and Patrick jerk apart. Tashi’s still standing by the door, but she’s turned around to finally meet their eyes. The jet lag’s plain on her face and in the messy twist of her hair—as long as it used to be, now, when they were seventeen—but she’s giving them that signature Tashi Duncan half-smile.
She once asked him if she had a tell, and though Patrick would never give away the only edge he holds at strip poker nights, if she pushed him more, he would have told her it was that smile. That small, cocksure half-smile that she only gets when she thinks she’s holding the winning hand.
“Patrick never actually said he didn’t like it,” she says.
Art spins back around to face him and Patrick has half a mind to duck. But he stands his ground, letting Art look at him as he runs back through their conversation, looking for the moment Patrick says he hates being called Lily’s dad. He’ll never find it.
Art’s eyes narrow at him. “You prick.”
Patrick shrugs. “Your fault for assuming the worst of me.”
“Of course I assumed the worst! This isn’t—I mean, this is— fuck .” He runs a hand down his face, and when it passes over his mouth, he’s smiling a little shakily. “And you— you just let me stand here and think you’re pissed—”
“Oh, but I am pissed,” Patrick says. Leaning on his right crutch, he digs the butt of the left into Art’s shoe until Art grimaces. “Imagining you two giggling in your bed at the Ritz about what a wonderful fucking time Patrick must be having right now.”
Tashi scoffs as she wanders over to them. Their foyer’s huge—everything about their insane, one-of-many McMansion is huge—but somehow the three of them found a way to cram together.
“Art was hardly giggling,” she says. “He made himself sick over it for the whole week. You have any idea how many times I had to knock the phone out of his hands to stop him from calling to warn you?”
“Well,” Patrick says, “ some warning would have been nice.”
“No, it would’ve been counterproductive,” Tashi says. “Because you only ever admit to wanting something if it catches you with your guard down.”
“And you’re the expert on what I want, then?”
“Yeah,” Tashi says matter-of-factly. “I am.” She raises an eyebrow, and there's enough challenge in her eyes to make Patrick feel like he’s back on the courts again. “Try telling me this isn’t what you want.”
He can’t.
She knows he can’t, so she smiles her winning-hand smile again.
“This could’ve ended really fucking badly, you know,” Patrick says, but he can feel his anger ebbing. It never manages to last long, with them. “I could’ve gotten so freaked out I’d just throw myself down the stairs, and where would your careers be without me?”
“So you’re not freaked out?” Art asks cautiously.
“Oh, no, I’m shitting bricks,” Patrick replies with a somber nod. “I told you before, Art, marriage, all that, that’s not what I was for.”
“I’m not asking you to marry us, dumbass,” Tashi says.
“Aren’t you, though?” Art murmurs.
Neither of them respond to that, because they already have a nuclear bomb on their plate and if they get into anything more tonight, Patrick’s head might actually implode.
“Look,” Tashi says instead, “I just thought you were getting tired of being her Uncle Pat, is all.”
“I would have never gotten tired of that.”
“Except?” she prompts, as if he’s still hiding something from her.
And he is. “Except,” Patrick says with a sigh, looking away from them both, “it wasn’t until she called me anything else that I realized I kinda, sorta, maybe wanted more.”
There’s a long pause.
“Kinda, sorta, maybe?” Art repeats, sounding unimpressed. “We’ll need something more concrete than that, Patrick.”
“I don’t know if I’m ready,” Patrick says, “but I want to see where it goes.”
More than that, really. He wants a lot more than that, he wants things he doesn’t have names for, he wants everything he didn’t allow himself to even consider at seventeen, at twenty-five, at thirty. Because in all fucking honesty, Patrick never intended to live past the day he retires, and he never really faced how insane of a prospect that was until he was sitting on the couch with a little girl who might need him even after he stops swinging a racket around.
Patrick wants to see if can survive this. He wants to know if he can have Father’s Day cards and weekends doing nothing and a life after tennis.
He wants. So badly, he wants.
He doesn’t say any of this out loud, but he doesn’t need to. Tashi’s fingers, still cold from the drive from the airport, are on his face, slowly turning him back around to meet her eyes.
She doesn’t blink.
“Don’t fuck this up, Zweig,” she says, and then she kisses him.
Her lips are cold, too, but Patrick doesn’t care. He eases one arm out of its crutch so he can hold her around the waist. Tashi grips him back, keeping him upright more than the crutches ever did.
When she pulls away, he chases after her before someone’s hand catches him by the jaw. It’s a bit warmer but more calloused, and he knows it’s Art’s before he even turns Patrick’s face towards him. Art’s eyes are heavy-lidded, and not from the jet lag. He starts to lean in.
“Sorry.” Patrick draws back with a smirk. “I only kiss champions.”
“Shut the hell up, man,” Art says.
“Make me.”
He does.
Afterwards, they pad towards Lily’s room and find her asleep with her arms around the giant shark plushie Patrick won for her at a theme park after sinking about a hundred dollars into a game of ring toss. She’s snoring and drooling enough to drown a whole colony of ants.
“She gets that from you, you know,” Tashi says accusingly, straightening her hoodie before starting down the hall to their bedroom.
“I know,” Art and Patrick say together before following after her.
Sacramento—August 2010
He has about a minute after he hears her car pull up to decide on what to say, but what is he supposed to say to an ex-not-exactly-girlfriend he hasn’t seen in years?
“Hey” doesn’t quite cut it.
“You’re looking great” would probably get him punched.
And “Well, well, well, look at what the cat dragged in” would definitely get him punched.
The minute ends and Patrick doesn’t get to say anything in the end, because Tashi Duncan steps into the room and he forgets every word he’s ever learned.
She sees him, he knows she sees him, but she pretends to look around the emergency room for a moment before making her way to the nurse’s desk. The nurse looks up and Patrick feels a white-hot spark of anger at the open interest on his dumb face.
Not that Patrick can blame him, of course.
Who wouldn’t fall for Tashi at first sight?
Tashi leans over the desk to talk to the dumb fucking nurse, who responds with more life than he’s shown in the past two hours. Patrick can’t hear what either of them are saying, but at some point, Tashi turns around to look straight at Patrick with absolute disgust on her face, so he knows the nurse must have told her about his financial situation. Patrick watches as Tashi turns back around, fishes her wallet out of her pocket and throws a handful of bills on the desk. Patrick looks away just as the nurse begins to count them by the hundreds.
He should have let the Tampa Tampon Truck kill him.
He hears the squeaking of tennis shoes on linoleum that stops right at the foot of his bed. He can feel her eyes on him, boring into him, and he knows he should say the first word because if he remembers her at all, he knows she won’t give him the last.
But Tashi takes first serve before he could even reach for his racket.
“This is low,” she says coldly, “even for you.”
“It’s not like I asked to be run over by a semi,” Patrick says, and he hates how small he sounds, hates how small she makes him feel.
“Oh, didn’t you?” Tashi gives a short, bitter laugh. “This is a cry for help if I’ve ever heard one.”
At that, Patrick finally turns to her.
And smirks.
“You still came,” he points out.
He notes, vaguely, that she’s still in her pajamas. He notes, disinterestedly, that the hoodie she threw over it is one of Art’s. He notes, off-handedly, without a care in the world, that she doesn’t have a ring on her finger, which could mean nothing. She could have just left it at home.
Tashi’s lips curl into a sneer. “I came,” she says slowly, “to take my boyfriend’s name out of your emergency contact list.”
“Feeling jealous?” he asks, but only because he is.
She never called him her boyfriend, even when they were at their best. It was never even on the table.
But also: boyfriend. Not fiancé. Not husband. Not yet.
“Who would I be jealous of?” Tashi scoffs. “You or him?”
Patrick doesn’t reply, because what the hell could he even say to that? He just looks at her, fighting back another smirk because he knows it’ll piss her off, but he kind of wants to piss her off a bit if an argument’s what it’ll take to get her to stay for a minute.
It may just be the concussion talking, but Patrick thinks he might have missed her.
Tashi stares at him with her arms crossed, utterly unimpressed.
“All these years later,” Tashi says, “and you’re still lying to yourself.”
“Oh, you’re one to talk,” Patrick says with as much dignity as he can muster with bandages around his head. “Does Mr. Tashi Duncan even know you’re here?”
She doesn’t answer, which is an answer on its own, Patrick supposes.
“I have to ask,” Patrick continues, raw and nasty and unwilling to play with kid gloves because he’s never needed to with Tashi and because five hours before he nearly fucking died , “should I be expecting a wedding invite soon? I’m open to any role you want me to play, you know. Best man, flower girl, the bastard that stands up to object, professes his love and rides off into the sunset with the blushing bride.”
“The only way you’ll get into that wedding is in a body bag, Zweig.”
“But there will be a wedding?”
Tashi blinks once, slowly.
“He hasn’t asked,” she says.
“He will,” Patrick says with absolute certainty. “He’s been wanting to ask since he met you. Just don’t break his heart too terribly when you tell him no. I mean, Art acts tough but when we get down to it, he’s an exposed nerve—”
“But I’m not going to say no.”
For the second time that night, Patrick’s heart stops in his chest.
Tashi must see it on his face, because she gives him a half-smile.
“You really thought, after all this time, I was just going to wait around for you?” she says. Then, voice low and cruel, “That he was just going to wait around for you? Look at yourself, Patrick. Look at where you’re spending the night. Look at where you’re spending your life .”
“Sure,” Patrick says bitterly, “beat the dead horse, Tash.”
“Oh, I’m not done kicking.” She looks at him across his hospital bed, and Patrick doesn’t think he’s ever seen her this angry, not even when she was breaking up with him. Or did he break up with her? Did they ever break up at all? “Art is at the top of his fucking game. I can’t have you calling him up in the middle of the night and dragging him into this—this fucking mess you’ve made of your life. I won’t let you ruin him.”
“Is that what I did to you?” Patrick asks quietly.
Tashi’s eyes flash dangerously. She leans forward, fists digging into the bed, and spits out, “Lose his number. Lose mine. Don’t fuck with us ever again.” She straightens, the corners of her mouth twisted into a contemptuous scowl. “This is the last time I’ll bail you out.”
She starts to leave, and Patrick’s head throbs with what he tells himself are aftershocks from the accident. As she passes the guy with the black eye, asleep on his stretcher with the ice pack melting on his face, Patrick calls out to her one last time.
“If I had asked you,” he says, witnesses be damned, “would you have said yes?”
“Please,” Tashi says without turning around. “You never would have asked.”
And then she was gone, striding through the emergency doors and into the night beyond.
There’s a pit in Patrick’s stomach. It’s been there for years. He thinks he may have even been born with it. But it’s not until Tashi walks out on him for the second time in his life, taking Art with her, that Patrick feels the pit grow, expanding and taking over his entire body. His limbs go numb first, and then the rest of him.
He’s back in his car, watching the headlights coming.
Patrick lets go of the wheel.
With Tashi gone, the nurse is starting to nod off again. By the time he wakes back up, the sun is in the sky and Patrick Zweig is long gone.
Sacramento—August 2010
Here is what Patrick Zweig doesn’t see:
He doesn’t see Tashi Duncan wrap her arms around herself, standing beyond the hospital lights for a few minutes, just breathing in and out. He doesn’t see her hand shake as she runs it through her uncombed hair.
He doesn’t see her head back to her car, and he doesn’t see Art Donaldson reaching over the center console to open the passenger’s side door for her.
Tashi gets in, and neither of them say anything for a while. They just stare across the parking lot at the glass doors of the emergency room, even though they’re too far to see anyone inside.
“Was he…” Art begins, after a minute. Then, after clearing his throat, he restarts, “Is he alright?”
Tashi scoffs half-heartedly. “He must be if he can still look like that.”
He knows what look she’s talking about. It’s that smirk that starts in one corner before the rest of his mouth gets the memo and follows suit. Eyes half-lidded, head slightly tilted to the left.
It’s a multi-purpose thing, that look. He’s either inviting you to a fight or to his bed. Art never was able to figure out which one Patrick wanted more from him.
“When we got that call…” Art says.
“I know.” Tashi sounds exhausted.
“I only heard ‘crash’, so what was I supposed to think?”
Tashi leans her head back against the passenger’s seat and screws her eyes shut. “I know.”
Art’s hands tighten around the steering wheel as he glares out the windshield at the hospital. He’s not sure what he would do if he sees Patrick walking out of it. Maybe he’ll floor it and finish the job himself.
They have an early flight tomorrow to an Open halfway across the world, and yet here they are, sitting in the parking lot of a hospital two hours away from their apartment, except Art made the trip in one. He didn’t even have time to put on shoes. He’s still wearing Tashi’s slippers.
“I should’ve gone in with you,” he says hoarsely.
“No,” Tashi says, “you couldn’t have.” And then she crosses her arms over her eyes, the same way she did when she split her knee. “I thought—” Her voice catches. “I thought he was dead, too.”
Patrick Zweig doesn’t get to see Tashi Duncan cry.
Art reaches over and grips her thigh. She’s the only real thing in the world at that moment, the only thing that makes absolute sense to Art. He makes himself focus on the feel of her under his hand so he doesn’t have to think about the fact that he almost lost Patrick tonight.
He doesn’t want to think about the bone-deep fear at hearing his phone ring in the middle of the night and knowing, just knowing , it was about Patrick. He doesn’t want to think about having to shake Tashi awake because he was too much of a coward to answer it himself. He doesn’t want to think about the look on her face when they told her what happened.
He doesn’t want to think about how close he came to getting a call from a total stranger that his best friend was gone, and the only reason he was hearing about it was because Patrick forgot to change his emergency contact.
“Art,” Tashi sobs, “take me home.”
“Okay,” Art says quietly, his throat too much of a mess to say it any louder.
He drives them out of the hospital parking lot, and keeps his hand on Tashi’s thigh the whole ride back. Halfway there, she stops crying to stare blankly out the window. She pretends she doesn’t see Art brush his knuckles across his eyes in the reflection.
They will never talk about this night again.
Fremont—August 2010
All things considered, there wasn’t a lot of damage. Sure, his car has a few scratches that need buffing out and a smashed headlight that needs replacing, but it’s still running. It may cough and wheeze and protest at every sharp turn, but it’s still running.
So Patrick drives. He drives past the You Are Now Leaving Sacramento sign and past the Welcome To Fremont, Center of the Universe sign until he gets to the sign that says, Fremont Men’s Challenger, In Partnership With Sally Ann’s Pancakes and Pies.
He blows past that, too.
He has his last cigarette burning down to the filter between his fingers, and the last of his clean shirts balled into a makeshift pillow in the backseat, and he’s feeling really fucking tired. He thinks maybe he’s been tired for a long time.
So he gets back on the I-680 and keeps driving until his lungs start burning. He keeps driving even as he starts screaming, the gas pedal flat on the floor of his shitty, hand-me-down car. He drives past another semi-truck that could kill him and he entertains the idea of letting it, and then he’s laughing.
He must look deranged right now, but what would it matter? There’s no one around to see.
The next time he gets into an accident in the middle of the night, the nurses will take his name, find his records and find his emergency contact list blank. There will be no one to call.
Patrick keeps laughing. Patrick keeps driving.
The cigarette burns out.
Chicago—November 2026
Patrick walks back to his apartment alone. The winter’s been brutal, so he’s holding a cup of coffee between his hands to keep him warm, but he hasn’t taken a single sip.
The doorman lets him into the complex without looking up from his newspaper. They don’t really know him here, at least not in the same way the tennis world knows him. Patrick doesn’t mind; it’s why he chose this part of the city in the first place.
He shares the elevator ride up with a woman who looks at him for a second too long, and Patrick doesn’t know if it’s because she recognizes him from somewhere or if it’s not his autograph she’s interested in. When they get to her floor, she hesitates before putting a hand against the elevator doors to stop them from closing.
“Sorry,” she says, “but you own the penthouse, don’t you?”
Patrick smirks. “That I do.”
She smiles back. “I keep seeing you and Isabel out in the lobby, and I just wanted to say I think she’s really beautiful.”
“Don’t let her hear you say that, though,” Patrick says, laughing lightly. “She has a frightful ego.” Then, after a beat, he asks, “Do you want this?”
The woman blinks. “Excuse me?”
He holds up his coffee. “I promise it’s not poisoned or anything. I’m cutting back on caffeine and it just seems like a waste of ten dollars to throw it away.”
“You spent ten dollars on a cup of coffee?”
“And a Nutella croffle,” he says with a shrug. “But I already ate that.”
After a moment’s hesitation, the woman takes the cup from him and finally steps out of the elevator. She turns back around, mouth half-open as if she wants to say something else, but Patrick shuts the doors on her before she can. The elevator stops at the last floor and an electronic voice demands he put in the seven-digit password within three minutes before it automatically alerts security.
Patrick punches in 9-10-2006.
The elevator spits him out into the penthouse.
Isabel’s on him in a less than a second.
“Hey, come on, calm down,” Patrick says. “For fuck’s sake, Isa, you’re not a puppy anymore.”
She still thinks she is, most of the time. The one-eyed little thing still seems to believe she’s the same scrappy, skin-and-bones runt Patrick picked up from the side of the road a year ago, but she’s pushing forty pounds and Patrick’s not as strong as he used to be. Still, he picks her up and lets her whine to his face about being left behind while Patrick went on his run.
“Oh, what do you have to be miserable about?” he asks as he puts her back down after she gets in her obligatory kisses. “I left the heater on and you have more food in your bowl than I eat in a week.”
Isabel ducks under the couch and returns with a chewed-up tennis ball in her mouth. Patrick pats her furry little head.
“Not now, baby,” he says, padding deeper into his apartment. “I’m beat.”
The apartment isn’t the biggest place he’s ever lived in. It’s just a two-bedroom, two-bathroom space with wall-to-ceiling windows offering a partly obstructed view of Oz Park. It’s in a neighborhood snooty enough to have five-dollar coffees on every block, but also stubborn enough to hold on to the fifty-year-old burger joints that serve more grease than patty on their better days.
He mainly chose it because it was the closest place he could get to his mother’s assisted-living facility on such short notice, but it’s been a year since then and despite the circumstances that brought him out north, Patrick likes it.
He likes the floorboards that squeak every ten steps. He likes the trophies and the picture frames stacked on or against the wall with no clear design. He likes the laundry basket with fresh-pressed clothes sitting next to a pile of Isabel’s slobber-covered chew toys. He likes that the fridge is ostentatiously big and how he never has to worry if there’s anything inside it.
Most of all, he likes the freedom.
It’s something he never really had in his old places. Mostly because the paps knew where those places were and Patrick was always looking over his shoulder even if it's just to bring the take-out donuts in. But also partly because when he bought this place, with his own hard-earned money for once, he told Art and Tashi that they’ll be living under his roof and his rules.
“I cannot wait for this to blow up in your face,” was all Tashi said.
It hasn’t, so far.
The main rule was no interior decorators, no bulk-buying furniture sets from fancy catalogs, no getting bowels twisted over shit like color theory and whether or not the rug matches the curtains.
“You want to do this the old-fashioned way?” Art asked when they were first checking the space out. “Fighting for sofas at yard sales and picking out bedsheets from Target?”
“Yeah,” Patrick said giddily. “It’ll be great.”
“We’re not college students, Patrick,” Tashi said, grimacing at the exposed-brick wall that was a far, far cry from the carefully cultivated monochrome of their California home or the tasteful beige-and-ecru combo of their Italian summer house.
“Come on, Tash, just give it a try.” He wrapped his arm around her shoulders and drew her further into the apartment. “Just try to imagine it, okay? A bookcase there. A treadmill by the window. That one Warhol piece you like over the fireplace.”
“I still think we would be better off buying that place up on Burling Street,” she said. “It’s a better investment.”
“But it’s not about investment , Tash.”
“So what is it about, Zweig?”
He pointed a finger-gun at her and clicked his tongue. “It’s about livin’ la vida loca, baby. So, are you in?”
Tashi looked at him like she was tallying all the bad decisions she made in her life that led to this moment. But eventually, she just sighed. “Okay. Let’s put it to a vote.”
“Yes,” Patrick said immediately.
“I don’t really have a horse in this race,” Art said with a shrug, “but sure, whatever Patrick wants.”
They both stared at Tashi, who stared back.
“Idiots,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “ Fine. But if it’s not unanimous, you can forget about it.”
“Obviously,” Patrick said. “So, what about it, little shark? Do you like this place for us?”
Lily was standing with her face up against the window, but she turned around when Patrick called her.
With a very Tashi-like shrug, Lily said, “I think it’s fine, Dad, but I get to have the room with the fish tank.”
“There’s a fucking fish tank?” Tashi hissed under her breath at Patrick, but it was too late. He was already falling in love.
He can hear Lily in her bedroom now, blasting something loud and dark and angry on her speakers in another fit of adolescent rebellion. At least screamo music is her choice of poison, and not anything stupid like an acid-green mohawk or underage drinking or falling in love with her best friend. Patrick wouldn’t wish that last agony on his worst enemy.
He knocks on her door once to let her know he's back, and then he makes his way to his own bedroom.
“Hey, honeys,” he announces to the still-dark room. “I’m home.”
The large lump in the middle of the bed stirs, and then speaks.
“If you don’t shut the fuck up right now, Patrick, I’ll drown you in your Musketeers’ cup.”
“And good morning to you, too, Art.”
“It is seven in the morning.”
Patrick flicks the light switch on, and Art hisses at the sudden brightness like he’s some kind of vampire. He’s certainly gotten pale enough under the Chicago weather to pass for one.
“You might be withering away in your twilight years, Art, but some of us still like keeping up with our athletic lifestyles.”
“You smoke a pack a day and snort chocolate whenever Tashi’s back is turned,” Art mumbles from under the blankets. “Don’t think I can’t smell the coffee house on you.”
“It’s my cheat day,” Patrick says, dramatically defensive.
“You’ve been saying that all year.”
Patrick grins before he reaches down and yanks the blankets off the bed.
Despite his earlier teasing, retirement looks good on Art Donaldson, even though he’s glaring at Patrick with bloodshot eyes and a day-old stain on his sleep shirt. He’s earned back some weight on his bones, and has successfully grown his hair out to its full messy, US Juniors glory. His smiles are slower, more indulgent, like butter melting over a stack of pancakes that they can actually eat now. He smiles, Patrick thinks, like he has all the time in the world, because he finally does.
It’s how Patrick is smiling these days, too.
Retirement looks good on both of them, actually, but Patrick just likes looking at Art more.
“What?” Art taunts. “You just gonna stand there drooling over me, or are you gonna come back to bed?”
Patrick doesn’t need to be told twice.
He shucks off his sweaty hoodie and goes to fall into bed, but before he can, Tashi comes out of the shower in nothing but a tank top and one of Patrick’s shorts, and he freezes where he stands.
“No outside clothes on the bed,” she says, toweling off her hair.
“I wasn’t planning on wearing them for long,” Patrick says, voice rough.
Dear fucking God, it’s been years and Tashi still manages to suck the air out of Patrick’s lungs every time she enters a room.
Art props himself up on his elbows to grin at his wife, just as boyish and as obsessed as he was in 2006. “Good morning, baby.”
“Why does she get a good morning?”
“Because I’m his favorite,” Tashi says, walking over to the bed and leaning down to give Art a quick kiss.
“Damn right you are,” Art says as Tashi pulls away.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, Patrick pouts. He knows he’s a little too old for it, but he can’t help it. Whenever he’s around them, he’s always going to be that stupid seventeen-year-old with the stupid crush on the new girl and his oldest friend.
“Don’t worry, Pat,” Tashi says, ruffling his hair as she passes him. “I’m sure if you remember to wipe the contraband chocolate from your mouth before you come up here, you’ll be someone’s favorite.”
He watches her as she goes to stand by her desk, unable to cut his eyes away from the miles of skin showing beneath her— his —shorts. His shameless ogling is interrupted by a pillow hitting the back of his head, and he turns to grin stupidly at the other gorgeous person in the room.
“Creep,” Art says.
“Hypocrite,” Patrick shoots back.
He turns back to Tashi just as she’s tapping her laptop awake. She scrolls through her emails for a minute before shutting it off again.
“No one good enough to fill the hole we left behind, then?” Patrick teases.
He knows the opposite is true. Ever since he and Art retired, tennis players far and wide have been tripping over each other to get a chance to work with the woman who turned Patrick Zweig into a rags-to-riches Grand Slam princess and Art Donaldson into a legend. They both knew Tashi wasn’t going to stop working even if they did, and there was no chance in hell they’d ever want her to.
Someone had to keep funding Patrick’s expensive taste in sushi and Lily’s swimming lessons, and it wasn’t going to be Art with his public-school tennis coach salary and non-profit foundation work. He just had to “give back to the community” like the knight-in-shining-polyester that he is.
It’s noble work, to be sure, but why couldn’t he just do what Patrick’s doing and spend the rest of his days in comfortable, sugar-baby bliss? Patrick can attest to it being the cushiest job he’s ever had. Art’s missing out, big time.
“There’s a few promising leads,” Tashi says, tapping the edge of her desk thoughtfully. “There’s this girl coming up from the NCAA. Katie Cruz. Going pro next year.”
Patrick and Art share a glance. They already know where this is going because it’s the first time Tashi’s mentioned a prospective player without sneering at their audacity.
“I’ve seen some of her highlights online,” Art says slowly.
“And?” Tashi prompts, waiting expectantly for Art’s opinion. That’s where the players with the big-money offers often get it wrong. They didn’t need to court Tashi so hard when all they needed to get to her was to get to her husband.
Art shrugs. “She reminds me of you.”
Tashi gets a soft look in her eye, and Patrick grins at her.
“Fuck the no-outside-clothes rule?” he suggests hopefully.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Tashi says, already tugging off her top as she walks back to the bed. “Go take a shower and if you’re fast, we might let you catch up.”
Patrick breaks the world record for quickest shower.
They spend the rest of the Saturday morning in bed. There are no drills to run, no minimum number of laps to finish, no serves to perfect, but even retirees need to get their adrenaline rush somewhere. At one point, Tashi reaches up to swipe the Nutella from the corner of Patrick’s mouth, and Art licks it off her thumb, and Patrick feels his heart burst in his chest.
He could die a happy man, just like this.
Afterwards, they lay in a tangled mess and Patrick’s not even sure whose arm it is around his waist and he doesn’t care enough to check.
“I think the redhead from the eighth floor was flirting with me,” he says breathlessly, staring up at the ceiling.
“Did you flirt back?” Tashi asks from somewhere to his right.
“Nah,” Patrick says with a faint smile. “Three’s already a crowd.”
“It wouldn’t work out with her anyway,” Art says, planting a kiss on Patrick’s shoulder that ends with a sharp bite. “You’re the kind of mess only we can handle.”
“Hallmark line,” Tashi and Patrick say at the same time.
Even after all the fuss Patrick made about this being his place, his rules, the bedroom still holds marks of the three of them. Art’s old tennis racket is hanging on a hook on the door next to Tashi’s running shoes. Old tennis magazines are stacked on the bookshelf next to large history volumes that Patrick’s never touched. Tashi picked out the wallpaper, Art the bedframe and Patrick the glass cabinet that’s slowly filling up with the trophies and trinkets they’re stealing one by one from their other houses.
They haven’t even been back to California or New York or Italy in months. Maybe they will, when Tashi’s job eventually forces them to, but for now, looking around, Patrick thinks he’s done pretty well for himself. And for them.
On the west wall of their bedroom, there’s a row of picture frames. There’s a newspaper clipping from the Fire and Ice US Juniors win, and a photo of Tashi in her blue party dress. There’s her holding Lily for the first time and Art teaching her how to ride a bike and Patrick shivering in the stands of her first outdoors swim meet. A picture of Isabel as a puppy chewing on Tashi’s favorite heels, of Art’s grandmother, of Patrick’s parents, of Tashi’s mom.
And then, everywhere, the three of them. In Paris, in Rio, in Art’s childhood bedroom, on the stage after Tashi’s address to the Stanford graduating class of ‘24, at Art and Patrick’s joint retirement party, on the court—hand in hand in hand—after their final championship together.
Patrick slumps back on the bed, sweaty and spent and satisfied.
All in all, he thinks, he’s had a pretty great run. Better than great. It's absolutely fucking perfect.
“You know,” Tashi says slowly, wrapping her leg around Patrick’s waist in that way that lets him know she’s about to ask him for a favor, “Katie’s going to need a hitting partner.”
Patrick groans. “Can’t we bask in the afterglow for a few minutes before you bring up tennis again?”
“Fine,” Tashi says, and he feels her smile against his arm. “ Two minutes.”
“Two whole minutes?” Art says with an over-the-top gasp. “You must really love us, huh?”
“Yeah,” Tashi says softly, gently, as quiet as spring rain, “I really, really do.”
Everywhere—All The Time
Patrick Zweig is home.