Page 230 of The Fall
He rips through the defense, executes an impossible dip around Fischer, his wrists so smooth it’s surreal, and lifts the puck over Axel, top shelf.
The whistle blows. The guys scatter, half to shoot the breeze, half to grind out extra sprints, but Blair skates toward me.
This is the part where he grabs a bottle, where his voice will drop and he’ll ask about my head. I know he’ll lean in. I know exactly how the water will taste when he hands it to me.
It happens. Every gesture, every breath, every second. His eyes stay on me while I drink, and the team’s noise fades to white static. My hand trembles as I lower the bottle. The plastic crinkles under my grip.
“Doc clear you to stand around?”
“For now.”
“How’s the head?”
Fucked. Broken. Looping like a scratched record. “Better.” Liar, liar.
His eyes search my face. They are the purest ocean blue, all those shades I could draw from memory. A drowning man could find peace in those eyes.
“You’d tell me if something was wrong.”
Blair doesn’t frame it as a question. He never does when something matters to him.
This lie burns worse than all the others. “I’d tell you.”
He keeps watching me as he unlatches his helmet and rakes a hand through his damp hair. The scruff on his jaw catches the light. He didn’t shave this morning. He rushed me to see Dr. Lin.
Each detail is another lock clicking shut. Why is this happening? Where does this end?
“You sure you’re okay?”
The softness in his voice breaks something inside me. “Yeah. A little disoriented.”
Disoriented. As if that could possibly capture the sensation of time eating its own tail, of living inside an echo of a life already lived, of the sense I could touch another version of this moment.
Cold leaks through my hoodie where the boards meet my forearms. Blair’s still watching me. A single bead of sweat traces down from his temple, catching on the dark sweep of his hair before sliding off his chin, the exact route I’ve seen it follow before, like water tracing its channel in stone.
Coach’s whistle cracks through the rink, and the moment shatters.
“After this, we’ll get you somewhere quiet. Stretch out, decompress.” He tugs his helmet back into place, shoots me a short nod, and then skates backward, his eyes never leaving mine. I watch him go, every glide pulling him further from me.
I’ve felt this punch of longing before.
How many times have I stood here watching Blair skate away?
The rink softens as my vision shifts, like looking through water that won’t settle, like two photographs bleeding into each other. There’s Blair in his practice jersey, and there’s also Blair a heartbeat out of sync, his ghost moving through the same ice, the same turns. My breath hangs between me and the practice happening twenty feet away. The guys weave through orange pylons while I am pinned between one second and the next, between what’s happening and what already happened.
This isn’t my brain misfiring from the concussion. This is—God, whatisthis? I force another breath down, then another.
Blair completes another drill, his hands so sure with the puck that might as well be tied to his blade with string. It obeys him the way it always does, the way it always will, the way it always has.
Hayes crashes into the boards beside me, and for a second I’m in two places at once: here with Hayes’s wide smile aimed at me, and also somewhere else where Hayes is?—
Gone.
Gone how? Why?
Fuck, I can’tremember.
My nightmare burns behind my eyes: a single scream the length of a whole night, shattered glass, stars falling, the final, terrible stillness of Blair in my arms, falling, falling, free fall?—
