Page 121 of The Fall
One by one, I fire them at the empty net, each shot a little harder than the last. I retrieve them all and start again, faster this time. Shoot. Retrieve. Shoot.
The sound of another set of skates coming across the ice registers only after they’re halfway to center.
It’s Blair. He’s here. Why?
He disappears into the corners of the rink, cycling through his own warm-up routine, bouncing a puck on his blade. I remember this rhythm, and I hate knowing every move he makes before he makes it. We used to hum together, two matching gears.
He glides into my zone, circles me twice, then gathers half of my pucks and moves them to the blue line. He places four in arow, evenly apart. We’ve run this drill enough times that I know what he’s setting up.
My heart hammers as I push off, and he shoots the puck exactly where I’ll be in three strides. We pass once, then again, and then the puck becomes air and instinct. The unspoken choreography we used to write without words from a life we’ve never lived fills me. The ice opens up; every release is razor clean. We loop the sheet in rhythms no coach could script. I flick a puck his direction, and he corrals it flawlessly. His edges dig in, that natural left-side lean. I pivot wide, catch his return, and fire a one-touch release. Again. Again.
When we finally break, sweat rains from me despite the cold. We coast into silence together by the boards. I lean over the gate and grab the water bottle.
Blair pours water over the back of his neck. “You played like shit last night,” he says.
“I was a fucking disaster.” I drink and let the water rise in my throat, then swallow salt back down. I stare at the ice between my skates.
“You want to be great, right?” he asks.
Something curls inside me. “Yeah.”
“Then stop being only good enough.”
The cold burns my lungs as I breathe. Blair stands there, water still dripping from his dark hair, waiting.
“I don’t?—”
I don’t know how to be anything else. I don’t know how to want without apology. I don’t know how to reach for greatness when good enough has been my ceiling for so long.
“What if I’m not—” I stop. Swallow. “This could be all I’ve got. That, last night, could be me.”
Blair’s eyes find mine. “Then you wouldn’t be here at five in the morning.”
He’s right about that too. Nobody who’s given up drags themselves to an empty rink before dawn. Nobody who’s settled shoots pucks until their shoulders scream.
He pushes off the boards, skating backward. He’s drawing a line beneath my self-doubt, my self-castigation, my endless sprint toward some imagined finish line where I’ll finally realize I don’t deserve... what? To be here? To play? To matter?
Him?
The question splits through me. I push it down, bury it beneath layers of sweat and exhaustion. My legs burn as I follow him back toward center ice, the bucket of pucks waiting where we left them.
Blair flips one onto his blade without looking, the motion so smooth it’s almost lazy. “You’re thinking too much.”
“Story of my life.”
“No.” He stops skating, plants his edges. The puck balances on his stick like it belongs there. “You think about the wrong things.”
I coast to a stop across from him. The empty arena holds our breathing, the scrape of steel on ice, the hum of the overhead lights.
“When you missed that pass to Hayes in the second—” He flicks the puck to me, a perfect saucer that lands soft on my blade. “Where were your eyes?”
I send it back. “On the defenseman.”
“Why?”
“Because he was closing the lane.”
“Was he?” Blair receives my pass and holds it. “Or were you so busy worrying about him that you created the problem?”
