Page 237 of The Fall
Mentally? That’s more complicated.
“Well then, let’s get you checked out and cleared.” He reaches for the shampoo, squirting some into his palm. “We need our Kicks back for this roadie. Gotta seal the deal.”
He works his hands through my hair, washing me with the softest touch I’ve ever known. My dread lets go, at least for now, as I dissolve into his touch. Suds slide down my temples, and Blair’s thumbs follow. He turns me to face him, the water streaming between our bodies. His eyes search mine, steady, ocean-blue, always deeper than they look.
I let my forehead fall against his chest. His heart thuds beneath wet skin, and the scent of lime and salt clings to him even under hot water. Steam rises between us in lazy curls.
The water cascades around us, creating our own private world. “I can’t wait,” I breathe.
All the words I can’t say right now settle into silence.
Blair drops a kiss to my hair. “Let’s get you rinsed off.”
In his arms is the only place I want to be.
Forty-Eight
I rollthe protein bar Hollow tossed me between my palms as my mind slips, tugged both toward phantom memories and the life happening in front of me.
My teammates sprawl inside Tampa’s private terminal. Floor-to-ceiling windows frame our charter plane on the tarmac, where the pilot circles his aircraft, inspecting it, moving through patches of shadow and light.
I chew and force the protein bar down. It sticks in my throat, dry and chalky as I track the pilot outside, counting his steps around the plane. One, two, three... The repetition helps quiet the noise in my head. The boundaries between then and now keep blurring.
I rub my temples, trying to press away the pressure building there. Dr. Lin cleared me for the roadie this morning after I sat in her office and fed her all the right words. I passed her test, but I’m failing my own. Every time I close my eyes, fragments of things that haven’t happened yet flare.
“How are you feeling?” she’d asked me as soon as I sat down.
I gripped the edge of the exam table as she’d studied me. My brain scrambled for what to say, what I’d said before, what I should say now. The edges of memory rippled and blurred.
“Good. Ready for Philly.”
Her eyes had narrowed. “Any lingering symptoms? Memory problems?”
“No.” I’d wanted to laugh, to tell her that the problem isn’t memory loss, it’s too much memory, a doubling back on itself.
She asked about my sleep, my appetite, whether I’d experienced any more dizziness or confusion. She saw a player recovering from a hit. To me, the walls were closing in; part of me wanted to ask her if a soul can get a concussion. Is what’s eating at me neurological or existential?
But I gave her the answers she needed to hear, and I walked out with my clearance.
“Torey,” she’d said. “If anything feels off, you call me. No heroics.”
“I’ll come straight to you.” I gave her my best team-guy smile. The lie had rolled out smooth as tape on a fresh stick. Fake it ’til you make it, right?
My tongue scrapes against my teeth. Outside, the tarmac ripples in the heat. The pilot’s on his fourth circuit now. I breathe in, slow and deep, trying to sync my rhythm to his pace.
Through the reflection in the glass, my teammates are scattered across the lounge, twenty-odd pros trying to kill time.
Axel tips his head back and closes his eyes. Svoboda’s passed out across two chairs, long limbs everywhere. The same low buzz of conversation, the same clink of a water bottle, the same sharp bark of Novak’s laugh after a FIFA goal. My world is a sequence of recognitions: a word, a glance, the angle of light slanting through the window, echo layered over echo.
And then there’s Blair, my lighthouse through it all. His dark hair falls forward, the same way it did that first day after skate, when he was sweat-soaked and angry at the world. The static in my head grows louder, drowning out the hum of the air conditioning.
Blair turns, as if my stare tugs him around. God, that smile, the one that saysthere you arelike I’m the answer to a question he’s been asking his whole life, starts in his eyes when he sees me. I’ve spent nine months earning it, learning its variations: the quick flash in the locker room, the devastating full version that only appears when we’re alone, when his walls come all the way down.
An inside-out sense of déjà vu sets up camp inside me. It was my choices that brought me here, wasn’t it? My choices, my path, my life. Blair and I have built this year together.
So why does it seem I’m walking in footsteps already pressed into the earth?
A flight attendant appears in the doorway to the jet bridge. “Gentlemen,” she says, “we’re ready to board.”
