Page 117 of The Fall
Blair sits across the aisle, his face lit up by his tablet. He’s watching game footage, rewinding the same sequence over and over, and I pretend to watch the landscape out my window, but I’m not. I’m watching him.
There’s a steadiness in him again. He’s talking more during drills. Cracking a dry joke when Hayes blows a rush. Leaning in at team meetings and in the locker room. I watch him—reallywatch him—and it’s like seeing sunlight finally cut through after months of gray. His finger swipes across the tablet screen,pausing on a defensive breakdown. The captain is emerging from the ruins.
I shift in my seat; it draws his attention. Our eyes meet across the aisle.
He knows I’ve been watching; I know he knows. He holds my stare, and the space separating our seats seems to shrink. A beat passes. Then another. He’s not going to look away. Neither am I.
“Their neutral zone trap is garbage,” he says, turning the tablet toward me. “Look at this gap.”
The old Blair would have kept it to himself, worked through it alone.
“Massive,” I agree, even though the angle of his tablet makes it hard to see.
His mouth curves, not quite a smile but close. “Come here,” he says, voice low enough that only I hear it over the engine drone.
I unbuckle and cross the narrow aisle. He shifts toward the window, making room, and I drop into the seat beside him. Our thighs touch through our team sweats, and the contact sends heat racing up my leg.
“Watch this.” He angles the tablet between us. On screen, New York runs their power play from two nights ago. “See how their weak-side defenseman cheats?”
I lean in for a better view. His breath stirs the hair at my temple.
“Every time,” I say. “He’s telegraphing the cross-ice pass.”
“Exactly.” His finger traces the defenseman’s path on the screen, and I follow the movement, mesmerized by his hands. “If we bait him into committing early...”
“We could reverse it back door.”
“Here,” I tap the screen, my finger hovering where the defense collapses.
“Good eye,” he says.
I’m hyperaware of how close we are, but I force my attention to stay on the tablet. Hockey. Focus on hockey.
Blair nods, and I rise and cross back to my own seat. I sink into the cool leather and fumble with my seatbelt.
My mind is stuck in that shared space, replaying the low timbre of his voice at my temple, the way his finger moved across the screen.Good eye.Two words. It’s nothing. It’s a captain giving feedback to a teammate. It’s what he does.
I risk a glance across the aisle. His head is bent again, his focus complete on the game footage. He’s moved on, already dissecting the next play. The interaction is over for him.
But it’s not over for me.
I turn away, facing the window. My own reflection is faint against the clouds, a ghost staring back at me. And behind that ghost, superimposed over the darkening world, is the faint, reflected glow of Blair. He is a constant, steady light in my periphery.
His reflected form shifts; my own is barely there. He is solid. Even as a mirage on the glass, he’s more real than I am.
“Kicks, over here.”
Blair stands at center ice, stick planted, shoulders squared. He lifts his stick and taps it once on the ice, a summons and a challenge.
I skate toward him and square up in a spray of ice.
“You need to fix your backhand.” His gaze flickers over me as if he’s already decided how to fix me and is pulling the levers. “Your weight is off,” he says, skating a slow circle around me. “You’re favoring your right side too much when you transition.” He stops his slow circle directly in front of me.
He’s right, of course. The imbalance he’s talking about is right there.
He pushes backward, never breaking eye contact.Follow me.
I fall right into his rhythm. I adjust my stick, drop my shoulders, and chase his turns. I’m his shadow, except I don’t know where his light starts and ends anymore. Blair has a way of pulling and pushing you at the same time.
